El Cocuy holds the largest mass of permanent ice in Colombia: a chain of 18 glaciated summits strung along the Eastern Andes, barely six degrees north of the Equator. The tallest, Ritacuba Blanco, reaches 5,330 metres, the highest point in the whole Cordillera Oriental. From below they read as a white wall standing over brown moorland, with no forest between. Below the snowline spreads the páramo, a spongy high-altitude moorland found only in the northern Andes, which soaks up rain and feeds much of Colombia's water. It is carpeted with frailejones — slow-growing plants with thick silver-furred leaves on tall woody trunks, some head-high and older than the people walking past. Local people call them the guardians of the water. Flat-topped rock towers rise out of the same ground, the sheerest of them the Púlpito del Diablo, standing near 5,100 metres. The park was established in 1977 and covers more than 3,000 square kilometres.
Walking in, you notice the silence first, then the thin air above 4,000 metres. Trails cross peat that yields softly underfoot and fields of frailejones, and pass glacial lakes lying mirror-still beneath the sky. Spectacled bears live in the forest below, and this is one of Colombia's last strongholds of the Andean condor, whose wingspan reaches close to three metres. But you can only go so far. Since the park reopened in 2017 after a long closure, nobody may step onto the glaciers. They are sacred to the U'wa people, who now help manage the park, and too fragile to bear the traffic. Camping inside the boundaries is banned, every visitor must hire a certified guide, and the high routes are walked as long single-day hikes. You reach the edge of the ice, stand at the foot of the white peaks, and turn back.