Bogota Blogger

Just around the corner from where I live is an old and somewhat decrepit mansion called Villa Adelaida. It sits on a plot of land that stetches two blocks, from the Septima to the Quinta, just north of Calle 70. It’s also been a controversial subject for the past two years, as long as I have lived here, because some developers want their hands on it.

Right now Villa Adelaida is some kind of office for a parking company, and the back half of the property, the part facing Quinta, is actually a parking lot (and and expensive one) on the next block from where I live. It was scheduled to be converted into a shopping mall by Pedro Gomez, one of the biggest developers in Colombia and in Latin America, but the people in the neighborhood thought that was a totally inappropriate use.

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Chapinero is a large district that also has a few sort of smaller neighborhoods within its borders. I would call Chapinero the section roughly from Calle 69 in the north to about Calle 40 in the south, and from the mountain heading west to about Avenida Caracas or even further to Avenida Boyaca or so. It’s the most diverse and most interesting neighborhood that I know of in Bogota. I would describe it as similar to the Village in New York or Dupont Circle in DC back before those neighborhoods got so outrageously expensive that the diverse part of the diversity couldn’t afford them anymore.

The Most Diverse Neighborhood in Bogota

Chapinero is mostly stratas 3 and 4, and of course, as with most neighbnorhoods, the closer to the mountain the nicer. The part above the Septima (going up the mountain), in fact, is known as Chapinero Alto (High Chapinero). Here you can live in an upscale apartment in an upscale building for a reasonable price, and still be in walking distance of some pretty funky places.

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La Candelaria is the oldest neighborhood in Bogota, so of course the most historic also.  It’s the area around the spot where the city was settled by the Spanish in 1538, which is roughly near the Plaza Bolivar (the main square in the city), at the foot of the mountain below the peaks of Monserrate and Guadalupe. This is probably the most touristic area of the city, with a concentration of cathedrals and churches, colonial architecture, government buildings and museums that is thicker than anywhere else in the city. People live in the Candelaria also, and there are hotels and restaurants and some night life, though, as the city center, it’s also a little dangerous, especially after dark.

Tourist Attractions

There are tons of tourist things to do in the Candelaria, and walking around looking at the architecture is probably number one. The Teatro Colon (Columbus Theatre), a theatre and opera house opened in 1905, and the hotel near it are a good place to start. Opera, when in season, costs about $15 US, by the way, for the least expensive seats.  That’s about 15% of the cheapest seats in the US, I think. Last year I saw The Barber of Seville.

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Parque 93 is an actual park, a square block, in north Bogota that is surrounded on all four sides and for a few blocks around by upscale restaurants and bars and clubs. It’s actually bordered by Calles 93A and 93B and Carreras 11A and 13. 

The scene here is upscale and trendy, and is a real mixture of bars and restaurants, so there’s an eating crowd and a drinking and dancing crowd sharing the same space. The park is usually pretty lively, and is the second most popular place to find gringos and embassy folk, next to the Zona Rosa.

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In any good tourism guidebook, and even in the bad ones, you will find out for sure about the upscale restaurant scene in the Zona Rosa, and probably also about Parque 93. Both of them can be fun places, have some fairly cool restaurants (Zona Rosa more than Parque 93), and fill up most nights, especially weekends, with rich Colombians and gringos out on the town. Both of them are also pretty big party scenes.

But the Zona G is the place where true restaurant connoisseurs go. It’s a zone of restaurants centered around the block of Calle 69A from Septima to Quinta, and thereabouts for two or three blocks in?any direction.

Almost every one of the restaurants is located in an old house or mansion (some mansions house two to four restaurants). Apparently when this trend first started in the neighborhood, most of the restaurants were French, and there are still probably at least 6 or 7 of those, but there are all sorts of other cuisines now too.

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I live in Rosales.  This is a sector near between Chapinero and El Nogal–in fact, it might even be a part of Chapinero, technically. Rosales is a pretty upscale neighborhood, but not the one people (or guide books) talk about so much. It’s a little more discreet than some others, and also a little smaller. Most of the streets are charming (not the actual pavement, which sucks almost as much as the pavement in other parts of town does), and there are historic mansions now used as businesses or restaurants mixed in with the mostly modern brick apartment houses. The apartment houses in Rosales, I think, are more interesting architecturally than they are in most of the rest of the north part of the city, even though they are mostly the same concrete-trimmed brick boxes that characterize most of Bogota in the past 15 years or so.

I would describe Rosales as being stuck up against the mountain (and going up the mountain as far as possible) between approximately calle 69 and calle 80, and having the Septima as its western border. I have no clue if that resembles the legal description, but for neighborhood atmosphere, that’s what Rosales means to me. Therefore, it’s really only about 60 square blocks–kind of small and intimate.

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No matter how rich or poor the neighborhood, the sidewalks in this city are an adventure.? I am told that it is up to the owner of any particular business or residence to maintain the sidewalk in front of a building, so that accounts for a lot of it.

In a nice neighborhood, for example, there might be a beautiful brick or mosaic tile, or inlaid concrete sidewalk, very chic and stylish. But next door the owner could have a totally different idea about what his sidewalk should look like.  And, if next the next door owner doesn’t feel like maintaining his sidewalk at all, it might just crumble and have a few holes or loose bricks.  If you’re a pedestrian, you just deal with it.

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