Tayrona National Park is a stretch of Colombia's Caribbean coast where the highest coastal mountain range on Earth, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, comes down through rainforest to golden coves and house-sized boulders, and the only way to most of the beaches is a jungle trail. The Sierra rises to 5,700 metres and snow only 42 kilometres from the sea, and its foot is the park: from the Zaino gate the path climbs and dips through hot coastal forest, roots underfoot and birdsong overhead, before opening onto one palm-backed cove after another. The rocks stacked along the shore are pieces of the range's ancient granite core, weathered into smooth rounded blocks the size of houses, and the coves sit between them. Where reefs offshore break the swell, at La Piscina and Cabo San Juan, the sea turns clear and calm enough to swim; where they do not, the surf is strong and the beaches are for looking at.
The forest between the beaches is alive. Iguanas bask on the branches, troops of howler and capuchin monkeys cross overhead, and the cotton-top tamarin, a squirrel-sized monkey with a shock of white hair that lives only in the forests of northern Colombia and is now critically endangered, is sometimes seen near the trail. Cabo San Juan is where most people end the day: a thatched hut on a rocky point with a row of hammocks strung under one roof, a cove breaking on either side, and the sound of the sea all night. The coast belongs, in its own reckoning, to the four indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada, descendants of the Tayrona who built stone-terraced towns here and withdrew high into the mountains as the Spanish pressed in around 1600; several times a year the park closes for a fortnight at their request so that, as they put it, the mountain can rest. Tayrona is a beach you have to walk to, and the walk is half the reason it is still what it is.