The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a massif on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in Magdalena department, that climbs from beaches to permanent snow at 5,700 metres in just 42 kilometres, the highest coastal mountain range in the world, held sacred by four indigenous peoples, and hiding a lost city of the Tairona that is reached on foot in four days. Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City, called Teyuna by the peoples of the mountain, was built from around 800 AD, six centuries before Machu Picchu, and lay swallowed by jungle until 1972, when treasure hunters climbed its stone stairway and began stripping the graves of gold; the trek goes in and out by the same trail through humid jungle, across rivers waded chest-deep, sleeping in hammocks at camps along the way, and ends at a stair of 1,200 mossy stone steps climbing to a set of green terraces that float above the forest, the foundations of a town that held thousands. Along the path are the thatched hamlets of the Kogi and Wiwa, whose white-robed families share the trail, the men carrying the poporo gourds in which they mix lime with coca leaf.
The Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco and Kankuamo call the massif the Heart of the World and see themselves as its Elder Brothers, charged with keeping the planet in balance, and their mamos, the priests, close parts of the mountain to visitors when they judge it necessary. On a clear morning from the coast the white summits lift above the green foothills and the palm-lined shore, snow and a tropical sea in a single view. Higher up, the cloud forest of the San Lorenzo ridge is one of the richest places on Earth for birds found nowhere else, with hummingbirds, tanagers and antpittas that live only on this massif, among them the Santa Marta sabrewing, a large hummingbird feared extinct until a birdwatcher photographed one in 2022. The Sierra Nevada is a mountain that goes from the sea to the snow, and its peoples still hold the middle.