As the oldest city in South America, Santa Marta has a lot to offer as a tourism destination.
It’s not only great as a beach, culture and food destination but also as an ecotourism hub that is a launching point for some of the best trekking, birdwatching, indigenous tourism, waterfalls and surfing in Latin America.
Santa Marta is a city built around a contradiction that almost no other Caribbean destination can claim: warm beaches a few minutes from glacier-capped peaks, a colonial center older than Cartagena, and a mountain range packed with more bird species than you’ll find in most countries.
I wanted to put together some of the most interesting facts and statistics about the growth of Santa Marta’s tourism industry in the last decade.
1. Santa Marta’s 500-year history now anchors the tourism pitch
Santa Marta was founded on July 29, 1525 by the Spanish conquistador Rodrigo de Bastidas, who named it after Saint Martha, whose Catholic feast day falls on that same date. The name Martha comes from Aramaic and means “lady” or “mistress of the house.”
It is the oldest surviving city in Colombia and the second oldest in South America. In 2025 the city marked its 500th anniversary, and Colombia’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism promoted the celebrations under the label “Heart of the World.”
History is part of why people visit. The Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino, the estate where Simón Bolívar died in 1830, is one of the city’s most visited sites, and the colonial centre ties the beaches and mountains together into a single trip.
2. Santa Marta is one of Colombia’s fastest-growing destinations for foreign visitors
In 2025, international visitor flows to Santa Marta grew 19.7%, according to Migración Colombia figures reported by Medellín Advisors. That puts it among the country’s three fastest-rising destinations, behind San Andrés at 40.1% and Cúcuta at 36.7%.
The base is still small. Santa Marta drew more than 60,000 foreign tourists in 2024, about 1% of Colombia’s national total. The big urban hubs dominate, with Bogotá at roughly 1.9 million and Medellín at 1.18 million in 2025.
The national picture is the tailwind. Colombia recorded 5.1 million international arrivals in 2025, up 6% on the year, and better air connectivity through Magdalena and Santa Marta’s airport is one reason emerging coastal destinations are climbing.
3. Domestic travelers still carry the city, and internationals are the fast-growing minority
Colombia’s tourism economy leans on domestic travel, and Santa Marta is a classic case. Its beaches at El Rodadero and Taganga fill with Colombian families during the December and January holidays and over Semana Santa, the periods when national travel movements spike toward a million a month.
Foreign tourists are a small share of that 1 million+ tourists that visit each year. In 2025, Santa Marta received 72,276 visitors from 134 countries, of which 81% were for tourism, equal to 58,648 international tourists (about 6% of tourists).
The tourism statistics show that domestic visitors come mainly for sun and sand, while the international growth is concentrated in birding, trekking, and longer stays. The ecotourism push is aimed squarely at that foreign minority.
4. Tayrona National Park is one of Colombia’s two most-visited protected areas
Tayrona National Natural Park was Colombia’s second most visited national park in 2022, with 545,760 visitors. Colombia’s most visited national park is Corales del Rosario y San Bernardo, a marine park off the coast near Cartagena. Some estimates puts Tayrona visits as high as 750,000 in 2025.
Access to Tayrona is capped. The park sets a daily limit of just over 3,000 visitors, and it closes for set periods each year, usually in early February, early June, and late October into November, for spiritual cleansing agreed with the four indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada.
The park’s profile also carries risk. In February 2026 authorities closed Tayrona during a security crisis tied to armed groups operating in the Sierra Nevada, a reminder that this corner of the coast is still working through a difficult security history.
5. The Lost City Trek tripled its visitors in under a decade
The Lost City trek to Ciudad Perdida (known as Teyuna to local indigenous people), drew about 8,000 hikers a year around 2011. By 2019, the figure had reached roughly 25,000, according to CBC News. That is a tripling in less than a decade, with the route now one of the best-known archaeological treks in South America.
The site is managed carefully. Four indigenous groups oversee it and enforce a daily visitor cap, so growth has not turned it into a crowded attraction. The ruins date to around 650 AD, which makes the Lost City roughly 650 years older than Machu Picchu.
The comparison with Peru is the selling point. Machu Picchu sees more than a million visitors a year. Ciudad Perdida offers a similar multi-day jungle approach to an ancient city without the crowds, which is exactly what a growing segment of travellers wants.
6. The Sierra Nevada holds the densest concentration of endemic birds on Earth
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta has 635 recorded bird species, which is about 35% of all of Colombia’s birds packed into 1.48% of the national territory. It holds 36 species found nowhere else, the highest concentration of endemic birds anywhere in the world.
The wider country sets the scene. Colombia has more than 1,900 bird species, more than any other country, roughly 20% of the world’s total. Audubon calls it a birder’s destination above all others.
For visitors, the access points are short drives from the city. Birders head from Santa Marta up to Minca, San Lorenzo, and the El Dorado reserve, where most of the local endemics, including the Santa Marta parakeet and Santa Marta antpitta, can be found in a morning.
7. Colombia’s birding boom now rivals Costa Rica
Costa Rica spent decades building its name as the world’s ecotourism model, with national parks like Monteverde and Manuel Antonio and a tourism economy built around conservation. Colombia is now the country closing the gap on birding specifically.
The growth is steep. A study covered by UC Santa Cruz found Colombia reported 40 times more birding days in 2022 than in 2010, and it has been the top destination for birdwatching travelers for more than a decade. Among tropical countries, Colombia was the only one whose share of global birding tourism kept rising.
Santa Marta is the best birdwatching area in Colombia with the combination of a single mountain holding 36 endemics, new lodges and trails, and short access from a coastal city gives the region a draw that Costa Rica, for all its infrastructure, cannot match on endemic density. The gap with Costa Rica is guides, English, and polished facilities, which is where the next phase of investment is aimed.
8. Documentaries about the Kogi brought the Sierra’s indigenous cultures to a global audience
Two documentary films did more than any brochure to introduce the Sierra Nevada to the world. The 1990 BBC documentary “From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning,” made by Alan Ereira, was the first time the Kogi let cameras into their territory. Its 2012 sequel “Aluna: An Ecological Warning By The Kogi People” was filmed in part by the Kogi themselves.
Both films carry the same message. The Kogi, who number around 18,000, see themselves as guardians of the natural world and called the films a warning to outsiders about mining, deforestation, and ecological collapse. The first film was shown at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, and “Aluna” was timed for the 2012 UN sustainability conference.
That attention now shapes how indigenous tourism works here. Four peoples, the Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa, and Kankuamo, live in the Sierra, and the Wiwa run their own guided treks to Ciudad Perdida where Visitors increasingly book through indigenous-led operators.
9. The surf coast is growing from a backpacker secret into a recognized destination
The beaches east of Santa Marta have become a surf circuit. Costeño Beach, Mendihuaca, Los Naranjos, and Casagrande all have surf schools, with the best Caribbean conditions from December through May and the biggest waves between January and March.
The origin story is recent. Costeño Beach was a near-empty strip of sand until two Canadian brothers built a hostel there in the early 2010s, after which blogs spread the word. WaveCamps describes Colombia’s surf scene as growing rapidly as the country becomes safer and easier to reach.
Palomino, about two hours up the coast, has grown alongside it, known for river tubing and beginner waves with the Sierra Nevada peaks as a backdrop. Together these spots give the region a surf identity it did not have a decade ago.
10. Santa Marta is becoming a digital nomad base with Colombia’s first nomad festival in September
Santa Marta now markets itself to remote workers and digital nomads, with coworking spaces, cheap living, and beach-and-mountain access in El Rodadero. Colombia offers a 90-day tourist visa, easily extendable to 180 days, plus a one-year digital nomad visa that covers longer stays.
The headline event is Nomada Festival, billed as the first digital nomad festival in Colombia. It runs September 1 to 5, 2026 in Santa Marta, with five days of workshops, talks, and cultural programming. Sponsors include Hilton, the travel insurer SafetyWing, and Colombia’s national tourism brand, Marca País.
The festival is part of a wider push promoting Colombia, and Santa Marta in particular, through the country’s digital nomad networks. It signals that the city wants the longer-staying, higher-spending remote worker, not just the weekend beachgoer.
The Future of Tourism in Santa Marta
Colombia’s tourism ministry has set a target of 7.5 million foreign visitors by 2026, and Santa Marta is one of the destinations growing fastest toward it. The 2025 anniversary year and the arrival of a digital nomad festival show a city aiming past the weekend beach trip.
The strongest card for Santa Marta is ecotourism. No competitor can match the Sierra Nevada on endemic bird density, and the same mountain delivers the Lost City, the beaches of Tayrona, and a working coffee and cloud-forest economy in Minca.
Where Costa Rica won on guides, English, and polished lodges, Santa Marta wins on raw biodiversity and on prices that are still low. The next phase of growth depends on closing the service gap without losing the wildness that draws people in the first place.
The constraints are just as real. Tayrona’s February 2026 closure showed how quickly a security flare-up can shut the coast, and both Tayrona and Ciudad Perdida already run at or near their visitor limits. More tourists cannot mean unlimited tourists at the marquee sites.
The other open question is who benefits. The Sierra’s value now rests heavily on its indigenous cultures and the films that made them known worldwide. A version of growth that keeps the Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa, and Kankuamo in control of their own sites, and routes spending to local guides and communities, is the one most likely to last.
If Santa Marta can get that balance right, it can become the reference point for ecotourism in Colombia. Get it wrong and it becomes another mass-marketed crowded coastal destination.
He runs a cultural ecotourism company called Sacred Treks, where he ran some retreats in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and fell in love with this area of Colombia.
You can follow him on Instagram @kaaist
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- Coliving In Medellín: A Guide For Digital Nomads (2026) - September 1, 2026
