Bogotá D.C. is the capital and financial center of Colombia. The city is situated 2640 meters above sea level in the northern Andes of South America. Located on the southern end of an altiplano, a high altitude plain, the city is flanked by mountain peaks and is characterized by its rainy days, mild temperatures, TransMilenio, and mixture of colonial and modern architecture.
Before the arrival of Spanish colonizers, the region was home to many thousands of Chibcha (Muisca) Indigenous peoples. The Chibcha people create a fertile plain out of swamps through hydraulic engineering and architecture. This fertile land was dotted by numerous urban centers, with Bacatá serving as the most important of these settlements. Bacatá was to be transformed into Bogotá through physical and linguistic colonization.
Following the conquest and colonization at the hands of the Spanish, Bogotá became an administrative center for the Kingdom of New Granda and the seat of the kingdom’s Viceroy. The population of the altiplano diminished significantly, with a large number of Chibcha settlements being abandoned and the remaining becoming Spanish colonial towns.
Bogotá would go on to become the capital of Colombia following the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century. Through the republican period of the nineteenth century, the city would remain politically and financially important to a primarily rural country. This trend would change in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a consequence of two separate but connected civil wars (La Violancia 1948-1958, Colombian Internal Conflict 1964-Present), the population of Bogotá would climb from 660,000 in 1951 to over 7,000,000 in 2018. The rise of the population came from large numbers of internally displaced people attempting to escape the violence of rural Colombia to the relative safety of the capital. Acts of violence and terrorism did not remain an issue for the rural population of Colombia, with Bogotá being the site of a major popular riot, numerous bombings at the hands of narco-terrorists, and attacks by anti-government groups.
