The 36 Best Places in Colombia

Alquímico is a three-storey cocktail bar in a colonial mansion in Cartagena's walled city, with an all-female team that breaks into choreographed dance routines mid-pour. Each floor has its own mood, from courtyard fiesta to quiet classics to a rooftop where giant fans lose to the humidity. It ranks #3 on The World's 50 Best Bars, and at two a.m. they hand out chicken soup.

The research started on the Caribbean coast, documenting Indigenous recipes that were quietly disappearing, and the restaurant that grew from it now sits at number 48 on the World's 50 Best list and holds the Sustainable Restaurant Award 2025. Celele is a Colombian Caribbean dining room in Getsemaní where the menu reads like a field guide to a coast most kitchens ignore, built around native ingredients, local producers, and drinks made with Colombian fruits and fermented spirits.

Mamba Negra is a cocktail bar on the 22nd floor in El Poblado, built around a circular bar in low amber light, with a 180-degree view of Medellín that competes with the drinks for your attention. It's ranked #22 on the World's 50 Best Bars list. A salsa band or cumbia DJ runs most nights, and the Mamba Lab tasting room serves eight Colombian cocktails around a metal workstation that looks like a mad professor's.

The illustrated cocktail menu alone earns its place on the table, each drink built around Colombian regional ingredients the way the kitchen next door builds its plates. This is the bar inside Carmen, and the bar director treats it as seriously as anyone treats the food, leaning on native fruits, panela, and plantain vinegar to make cocktails that feel specific to one country and nowhere else.

Álvaro Clavijo spent years in Paris, then at Per Se and Noma, and came home to open a bistro that feels nothing like any of that. El Chato is a contemporary Colombian restaurant in Chapinero Alto where the menu bends to whatever small producers are harvesting, sometimes because Clavijo asked them to grow it in the first place. It holds the top spot on Latin America's 50 Best and sits on the World's 50 Best list too, worn lightly in a room that stays relaxed and unfussy.

Dense jungle presses to the edge of the sand at Cabo San Juan del Guía, inside Tayrona National Natural Park, so you arrive either by boat or on foot through the trees. A rocky outcrop divides two adjoining coves: one calmer and swimmable, one open to the sea. A small hut perches on the split between them. Named one of the World's 50 Best Beaches, the limited access keeps the crowds thin and the atmosphere unhurried.

Leonor Espinosa trained as an economist and an artist before turning to food, and the tasting menus at her flagship fine dining restaurant in Chapinero feel like both. The kitchen works with obscure Colombian ingredients sourced from communities most menus ignore, threading the country's biodiversity across five, eight, or twelve courses. Upstairs, her daughter runs a separate room focused on unusual wines and Colombian distillates. Leo holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Restaurants.

The drinks list at this Bogotá cocktail bar is built around Territorio, a range of house-distilled spirits inspired by Colombia's ecosystems, each one mapped to a different landscape. Laura Espinosa, former sommelier at the celebrated Leo next door, runs the room and the project. The cocktails read deceptively simple on the menu, which is exactly the point. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Bars list.

The tasting menu here is called Conectividad, which tells you exactly where the kitchen's head is. Afluente is a fine-dining restaurant in Bogotá built around Colombia's páramos, the high-altitude Andean ecosystems that supply the city's water and, it turns out, its most interesting ingredients. The rough plaster walls and muted wood keep things grounded while the lighting and crockery signal that you are not, in fact, eating rustic. It holds a spot on Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants list.

The name came from the first time the grill was lit, when black smoke poured through the Chapinero neighborhood. This izakaya-style restaurant takes Colombian ingredients through Latin American, Nordic, and Japanese techniques, all of it designed for sharing and paired seriously with cocktails. The chef trained at Fäviken and spent time at El Chato before going solo, and it shows in a room that plays grunge and lands on Latin America's 50 Best list without seeming to care about either.

Chef Manuel Mendoza, better known around Barranquilla as Mane, named this contemporary restaurant after himself, which either takes confidence or a very supportive grandmother. Both, probably. It's a tasting-menu-forward spot that takes Colombian ingredients from the Atlántico coast and runs them through an international lens, landing a spot on Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants. The tiradito of greater amberjack, raw with ponzu, has been on the menu from the start.

A pitched wooden ceiling, pumping music on the right nights, and a bar that earns its own visit set the mood at this Mediterranean-leaning restaurant in Chapinero. Chef Álvaro Clavijo pulls from Spanish, Greek, and North African kitchens while keeping a foot in Latin America, so smoked tiradito with mandarin and yellow pepper curry sits alongside pasta and focaccia without anyone blinking. It landed on Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants list, which tracks.

The menu changes every week, which means the kitchen is either deeply committed to Colombian producers or just very indecisive. It's a bright, plant-filled bistro in El Poblado with simple wooden tables and an open view of the cooks at work. Chef Jhon Zárate pulls from Colombia's extraordinary biodiversity, so one visit might bring cassava gnocchi, the next crab-topped arepas. A Discovery pick from Latin America's 50 Best.

A narrow, greenery-lined courtyard pulls you off a Chapinero street and into what feels less like a bar than a sun-warmed garden patio where no one is in a hurry. The cocktails lean approachable and cooling, built from familiar ingredients at a subway-tiled bar, which pairs well with the unhurried crowd lingering over desserts and conversation. A spot for a long, easy afternoon drink that somehow extends into evening.

Maradona watches over the room from the wall, which tells you a lot about the vibe at this Neapolitan-style pizzeria in the heart of Bogotá. The team imports ingredients from Italy and keeps the menu anchored in the classics, margherita, marinara, and good fried things done without fuss. A cocktail list running nearly twenty options gives you something to argue about while you wait. It ranked third on 50 Top Pizza Latin America.

Polished vintage wood, red and gold light, and low-key beats set the mood at this intimate cocktail bar tucked into Zona G, Chapinero's upscale dining corridor. The drinks lean creative in ways that reward curiosity, pairing rum with chocolate and bitter aperitif, or gin with kefir and shiitake, without making a big fuss about it. A neighborhood place that happens to have a neighborhood worth traveling across the city for.

You walk through a fragrant garden to reach the dining room, which sets the mood before you've sat down. This is a chef-driven restaurant where the menu maps the centuries-old cooking of southwestern Colombia, updated with a light contemporary hand. Every dish lists its origins, and the team can trace individual ingredients back to their source without blinking. Catalina Vélez trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, then came home to Cali to open something quieter and more specific.

Walls lined floor-to-ceiling with wine bottles set the tone at this tapas and small plates spot tucked into a traditional house in Quinta Camacho. The menu shifts constantly, threading Colombian ingredients through a Mediterranean lens, with things like palm heart cacio e pepe and octopus tacos sharing space with confit suckling pig. The front-of-house team treats pairings as a personal mission, which is convenient given the inventory surrounding you.

Osaka landed in Bogotá as part of a South American mini-empire that started in Lima and never really stopped expanding. It's a Peruvian-Japanese fusion restaurant where the kitchen blends both traditions closely enough that familiar ingredients end up tasting a little sideways in the best possible, wait, no, in a genuinely satisfying way. The room runs loud and lively, and regulars come back reliably for the ceviche and sashimi, which share a menu without any apparent identity crisis.

The vaulted glass roof is held up by repurposed pipework, which tells you most of what you need to know before the food arrives. This is a lunch-only restaurant run by a husband-and-wife team out of a Republican-era house, with sustainability baked so deep into the project that even the interior is part of the argument. The whole thing feels less like a reservation and more like being invited over by friends who happen to cook very well.

A wood-fired oven commands the room at this Italian-founded pizza restaurant in El Peñón, and the long-leavened dough with its gently puffed crust makes clear that someone here takes the process seriously. Beyond pizza, the menu runs to pastas and appetizers, with a kids' section that suggests families fill the tables on weekends. It landed on the 50 Top Pizza Latin America list, which tracks.

A pizza spot in Ibagué where the crust is soft and puffy with a pronounced edge, and the toppings lean into local vegetables and Colombian cheeses for something more creative than the usual lineup. The vibe is street-casual, the staff is young and genuinely warm, and DJ sets turn up on a regular basis. Their motto frames pizza as "an act of love," which could be embarrassing but somehow fits the room.

The olive oil ships in from Italy, which tells you where the priorities are. This is a pizza restaurant in Cali's Santa Monica neighborhood, turning out Neapolitan-style pies on a light, well-developed dough with classic and gourmet toppings. Tiramisu and panna cotta close things out, Italian wines and cocktails alongside. Named among 50 Top Pizza Latin America's Excellent Pizzerias, it has become something of a reference point for Italian pizza in the region.

The name is a Neapolitan slap-stretching technique, so the pizza here comes with a philosophy attached. This is a tidy Neapolitan pizza shop in Pasto with red and white pies, focaccia to start, and homemade spoon desserts to finish. Italian cheeses and cured meats do the heavy lifting, and the small drinks list covers beer, wine, and a few cocktails without overreaching. Delivery is organized, the room is calm, and 50 Top Pizza Latin America has taken notice.