The first time I came to Colombia was in 2017.

I had just been scuba diving in Bonaire and Curaçao with a buddy of mine, and I tacked on a Colombia trip almost as an afterthought: three days in Bogotá, three days in Medellín, back to back, same week, same version of me, same expectations.

And if I’m being honest, Medellín won that first round.

It was greener. It felt easier on the eyes. It had that immediate curb appeal that makes a city good at first impressions. Medellín looked like the postcard. Bogotá looked like the place the postcard forgot to mention.

But then I kept coming back to Colombia.

And the more time I spent here, the more the math changed.

Until one day I realized I had chosen Bogotá — not by accident, not because Medellín wasn’t good, but because Bogotá fit my actual life better than the city everybody told me to pick.

That’s what this article is about.

Not “Bogotá is better and Medellín is bad.” That would be lazy, and it wouldn’t even be true. Medellín is a great city. Millions of people love it. They’re not wrong.

This is simply my actual calculus: the 12 reasons I chose the city almost nobody tells you to choose.

And by the end of it, you may realize Bogotá is right for you too.

Or you may realize it absolutely isn’t.

Honestly, both are useful answers.

Let’s start with one of the least glamorous and most underrated quality-of-life advantages in the country: Bogotá’s altitude acts like a force field for a whole category of tropical nonsense.

I was just in Girardot for a weekend. Beautiful, warm, sunny, lovely place. Also, the mosquitoes there apparently held a town hall meeting and unanimously agreed I should suffer.

This is not a new problem for me. Mosquitoes have been treating me like dessert my entire life. As a kid, I got bitten so much that my mom’s doctor told her to put clear fingernail polish on the bites so they’d stop itching. Which is the kind of advice that only sounds reasonable if the situation is already out of control.

In Bogotá, I get none of that.

That’s not luck.

Bogotá sits at about 8,660 feet above sea level, and at that elevation, a lot of tropical life just doesn’t bother showing up. No malaria mosquitoes. No dengue mosquitoes. Far fewer infestations. Far less of that warm-humid-creepy-crawly ecosystem that comes bundled with lowland tropical living.

You generally do not buy bug spray in Bogotá for Bogotá.

You buy bug spray because you’re leaving Bogotá.

That alone is worth points.

Bogotá doesn’t really have seasons in the way people from the U.S. expect.

It has one basic mode: cool spring, all year, with occasional attitude.

That means mild days, cool evenings, jacket weather, some clouds, some rain, and very little drama. It doesn’t swing violently hot. It doesn’t try to boil you alive. It doesn’t hand you six months of swamp and call it paradise.

Now, Medellín gets sold as the city of eternal spring, and that’s not false exactly. It is pleasant. But Medellín’s eternal spring is warmer than most people picture, and for me, it lands closer to eternal late spring heading toward summer. Throw in the humidity and the bugs, and the equation changes.

Bogotá’s version is cooler, drier, and easier for me to live in long term.

There is no month where I feel like the climate is asking me for a favor.

That matters more than people think.

A lot of people hear “8,660 feet” and react like Bogotá is some kind of medically supervised experiment.

And yes, the altitude is real. Some people need a few days to adjust. Some people feel it when they walk uphill or have a drink too fast or try to pretend they’re still at sea level.

But here’s my personal angle on that: I’m a pilot.

Flying small unpressurized aircraft means 10,000 or 12,000 feet is not some apocalyptic concept to me. Bogotá is lower than my Tuesday.

And here’s the part that usually reframes it for people: when you’re on a normal commercial airliner, the cabin is typically pressurized to around 8,000 feet — which is basically Bogotá.

So if you’ve taken a long flight and felt fine, you’ve already handled Bogotá altitude. You just did it with a tiny bag of pretzels and somebody kicking your seat.

For me, the altitude isn’t a downside.

It’s the thing doing the work.

It’s what makes the air cooler, the bugs fewer, and the whole city more livable.

This one is personal, but I stand by it.

I’m a foodie. Bogotá is my city because Bogotá feeds me the way a real capital should.

The restaurant scene here is not just larger than Medellín’s. It feels deeper. Broader. More layered. More willing to surprise you.

Tiny family places. Great bakeries. International food. Higher-end tasting menus. Niche spots. Breakfast places. Hole-in-the-wall finds that permanently ruin your standards.

Bogotá just has more shots on goal.

And when a city is big enough and dense enough, that matters. You lose one favorite place and the city still has ten more to give you.

For years, my favorite breakfast spot in Bogotá was a place called Fellis up in Chapinero Alto. It didn’t survive COVID, and yes, I’m still emotionally processing that. But that’s the thing about a real food city: losing one great place hurts, but it doesn’t hollow out your whole life.

The city still feeds you.

And Bogotá does.

The airport matters more than people think.

Bogotá’s El Dorado is one of the busiest and best-connected airports in Latin America, and if you live in Colombia long enough, that stops being trivia and starts becoming infrastructure for your actual life.

Want to go back to the U.S.?

Want to hit the coast?

Want to get to Europe?

Want to move around Colombia efficiently?

Bogotá is the hub.

That matters because even if you live elsewhere in the country, a surprising amount of your flight logic runs through Bogotá anyway. So instead of living on one spoke of the wheel and connecting through the center every time, I just started living at the center.

That is one of those boring advantages that quietly improves your whole life.

Bogotá has scale.

That’s one of its best qualities, and also one of the reasons people get intimidated by it.

But the boring superpower of a giant city is availability. If you need something specific — a doctor, a specialty ingredient, a weird replacement part, a particular hobby supply, a printer that can handle something unusual, somebody who knows how to fix the thing nobody else can fix — Bogotá usually has it somewhere.

Smaller cities are great until you need something very specific.

Then they become a negotiation.

Bogotá isn’t convenient in the cozy way. It’s convenient in the only way that really matters: most things actually exist here.

Bogotá sits right in the middle of Colombia, and that makes it one of the best launchpads in the country.

If I want cool mountain air, I’m already in it.

If I want heat, I can go find it on purpose.

That’s the move, by the way. Live somewhere cool and stable. Visit the hot places. Don’t marinate in them full time unless that’s really your thing.

From Bogotá, the whole country opens up easily. Weekend trips, short flights, road trips, whatever version of Colombia you want next, you can usually get to it without turning your life into a logistical saga.

I like living in the middle of things.

Bogotá gives me that.

Bogotá has intellectual weight.

That sounds pretentious until you live in a city without it.

Museums. Theater. Music. Bookstores. Festivals. Universities. Public events. Cultural institutions. The kind of city where you can have a random Wednesday and still find something worth leaving the house for.

The Gold Museum alone is one of the greatest museums anywhere.

Medellín has culture too, absolutely. This is not a slight. But Bogotá has density. It has the concentration effect of a capital city. It feels like the place where the country’s art, argument, history, and ambition are all in one room trying to speak at once.

If you like a city with a brain, Bogotá makes sense.

This one gets a little spicy, but I mean it in the most respectful way possible.

Medellín has become a destination. A brand. A thing people say they “did.” And when a city becomes a brand, it starts to perform for visitors.

That changes the texture.

You start getting the tourist treatment, the pitch, the inflated pricing, the sense that the city knows you are temporary and is pricing accordingly.

Bogotá mostly does not care that you’re here.

And I mean that as praise.

It’s a working capital. It has real life happening all around you. It is not standing there trying to charm you into staying. It’s busy. It assumes you’ll either figure it out or you won’t.

I like that.

I’d rather be in a place that lets me live than in a place that keeps trying to sell me the version of itself it thinks I came for.

This sounds petty. It isn’t.

Whenever everybody starts recommending the exact same city, I get suspicious.

Not because the city is bad. Because obvious things get crowded, optimized, marketed, and priced faster than most people realize.

“Move to Medellín” has become almost automatic advice.

And maybe that’s right for a lot of people.

But if everyone is pointing at the same door, that door is eventually going to feel very full.

Bogotá being the less hyped choice is not a drawback to me.

It means the city hasn’t been flattened into a product quite the same way. It means there’s still more room for actual discovery. It means I get to choose the place that fits me instead of inheriting the default answer everyone else already repeated.

Bogotá has a reputation.

Big. Gray. Sprawling. Cold. Traffic. Why would you choose that?

And honestly, I’ve stopped trying too hard to correct that because its reputation does something useful: it filters people.

The people who only want postcard Colombia, breezy Colombia, easy Colombia, they often eliminate Bogotá before they ever arrive.

Good.

Because most of them weren’t going to like it here anyway.

The foreigners who do stay in Bogotá usually came because they actually wanted the city, not just the idea of moving abroad. They wanted urban life, complexity, culture, weather they can live with, and a place that feels more like reality than a curated brochure.

That tends to create a better crowd.

Less theme-park energy. More actual-life energy.

This is the one I want to say carefully.

Medellín’s rise has been real, and a lot of that growth is good. More investment, more tourism, more international attention, more opportunities.

But fast booms come with a bill.

Higher rents. More pressure on neighborhoods. More outside demand. More strain on the parts of the city that made it attractive in the first place.

I’ve seen this story before in other places.

When a city’s main narrative becomes how hot it is, how fast it’s rising, how many people are suddenly chasing it, I don’t automatically hear opportunity. Sometimes I hear warning light.

Bogotá grows too, of course. But it’s not living off one hype wave. It’s a huge established capital doing what capital cities do: absorbing life, expanding, adapting, continuing.

That felt more stable to me.

Less sexy, maybe. But more durable.

And I was choosing for a life, not a moment.

Because the bugs disappear.

Because the weather works for me.

Because the altitude is a feature, not a flaw.

Because the food is better.

Because the airport matters.

Because giant cities are annoying right up until you need what only giant cities have.

Because the whole country opens more easily from here.

Because the cultural life is denser.

Because it feels real.

Because it isn’t the obvious pick.

Because its reputation filters out the wrong expectations.

Because I trusted stability over hype.

But here’s the important part: half of those reasons are personal.

That’s the whole point.

If you love heat, if you want more green, if the boom feels exciting instead of cautionary, if the altitude sounds terrible, if your ideal life is lighter and softer and more postcard-shaped, then Medellín may absolutely be your city.

That doesn’t make you wrong.

It just means you’re not choosing my life.

And that is exactly how it should work.