Bogotá's Legalised Street Art and Tasting Menus Are Rewriting Its Old Reputation

For much of the past two decades, Bogotá functioned mainly as a stopover before Cartagena's colonial walls or Medellín's cooler climate. That's shifting, driven less by any single new opening than by two long-running trends finally converging: a street art scene the city chose to tolerate rather than fight, and a restaurant scene now regularly cited on Latin America's 50 Best list.

Graffiti the city chose to keep

Bogotá's relationship with street art shifted after 2011, when police shot and killed a teenage graffiti artist, Diego Felipe Becerra, sparking public anger and a subsequent policy change: rather than continuing to broadly criminalise graffiti, the city moved toward tolerating and, in places, actively commissioning it. Neighbourhoods including La Candelaria and Chapinero now carry murals covering entire building façades, some by internationally recognised Colombian artists, turning parts of the old town into an open-air gallery that didn't exist in this form a generation ago.

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A tasting-menu scene with real critical weight

The city's restaurant scene has followed a parallel trajectory. Chef Leonor Espinosa's namesake restaurant has repeatedly placed among Latin America's 50 Best, built around ingredients drawn from Colombia's Amazon, Caribbean and Pacific regions rather than imported staples, a shift toward showcasing the country's own biodiversity rather than borrowed technique.

Sundays without cars

Less globally known but locally foundational is the Ciclovía, Bogotá's long-running Sunday programme that closes major roads to motor traffic and opens them to cyclists, runners and walkers. Running since the 1970s and now covering roughly 120 kilometres of road each week, it's one of the largest recurring car-free programmes of its kind anywhere, and gives visitors an unusually direct way to move through neighbourhoods that would otherwise mean sitting in the city's notorious traffic.

Altitude changes everything else

None of this happens at sea level. Bogotá sits on a high Andean plain at roughly 2,640 metres, cooler and thinner-aired than the Caribbean coast most visitors picture when they think of Colombia, a fact that shapes everything from the produce on Espinosa's menus to the standard advice, usually well founded, to take the first day slowly.

Traveller tips

• Give yourself a day to adjust to the altitude before a heavy walking itinerary; Bogotá sits far higher than most Colombian coastal cities.
• Ciclovía runs on Sundays and public holidays, closing major roads to cars from early morning into the afternoon.
• La Candelaria's street art is best seen on a guided walking tour, which typically explains individual murals' context and artists.
• Book well ahead for well-regarded tasting-menu restaurants, which often carry waitlists of several weeks.