The Cañón del Chicamocha has always been one of South America's most dramatic landscapes — a gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon, cut by the Chicamocha River through the Colombian Eastern Andes. For fifty years, tourists did not go there. The communities at its rim were in FARC territory. Neither foreigners nor most Colombians had any business showing up.

The 2016 peace deal effectively redrew the map. It worked. By 2024, international arrivals hit 8.4 million—a massive leap that makes the 4.2 million from 2019 look like a different era. Most of this new traffic is pouring into three specific buckets. You have adventure seekers trekking through former war zones, eco-tourists pushing deep into the Amazonian stretches of Caquetá, and nature lovers finally reaching the Chocó coast. For an entire generation, these jungles were strictly no-go zones. Now, they are the engine of the region’s new economy.

The government's ProColombia agency is busy pumping money into newly accessible territory: airport upgrades in Florencia and Quibdó, a river tourism certification scheme for Amazonian community operators, and a network of community-owned lodges in the Serranía de la Macarena. These projects employ 1,400 people from former conflict-affected communities.

Nowhere is the shift sharper than in Guaviare department. Tourism revenue there was essentially zero in 2016. In 2024 it hit COP 380 billion — roughly €90 million — making it the fastest-growing economic sector in a region that was classified as a development emergency less than a decade ago. The peace dividend is no longer theoretical.

"Peace is not only the absence of war," said Tourism Minister Ligia Margarita Borrero. "It is also people seeing their country for the first time."