Colombia travel: driving to South America’s northernmost tip

A beach at Pilón de Azúcar on La Guajira Peninsula in Colombia (Image credit: Jesse Kraft/Alamy Stock Photo)

On the far north edge of Colombia there is a desert peninsula the size of Wales, where Arizona-like landscapes meet the sparkling waters of the Caribbean. Home to the indigenous Wayuu people, La Guajira is a place of great “beauty and strangeness”, said Ruaridh Nicoll in the Financial Times. The Wayuu resisted Spanish colonisation, and have since suffered persecution by the Catholic Church, the Colombian state and the country’s ubiquitous drug cartels. But lately, “life has been stabilising”, and tourists have begun to trickle to the peninsula, “some come to surf, others to sandboard down 60-metre-high dunes, and some just to swing in hammocks” beside the region’s wild beaches.

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Driving east along the coast from Cartagena you pass the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, one of the world’s highest coastal ranges, “topping out at 5,775m”. La Guajira lies in the mountains’ rain shadow, hard up against the Venezuelan border. The region’s capital, Riohacha, is a “sun-scoured” town founded nearly 500 years ago, when the Spanish discovered pearls in its bay. There are boutique hotels nearby (Territorio Magico in Dibulla, for instance), and driftwood resorts further on, including Ipuana Virgin Beach, which has “a fintech backpacker vibe”. But from Mayapo, for 100 miles to the peninsula’s tip, accommodation is in hostels only, and the roads are basic. Proceed with care, and preferably in a 4WD with a local guide.

Caracara falcons circle over the vast, red, cacti-strewn landscape, and tracks branch out across it to the widely dispersed rancherías of Wayuu families. Inland, there’s a “fantastical mountain oasis”, the Serranía de Macuira. And beyond it all lies the Rancheria Punta Gallina, the northernmost farm in South America, and then sand dunes, climbing up towards blue sky before plunging again into the roaring Caribbean foam.