LANDSCAPES AND PEOPLE: MANY COUNTRIES IN ONE

If ever a country's geography reflected and conditioned its society and politics it is Colombia's. The Andean range splits into three near the Ecuadorean frontier to the south, after marching monolithically up the west coast of South America for thousands of miles from the icy wastes of southern Chile. Any cross-country journey in central Colombia, where most of its 34 million people live, involves a succession of climbs and descents that are impressive and exhausting in equal measures.

A bus journey from the capital, Bogota, to the big industrial city of Cali in the hot valley of the Cauca river 280km away to the south-west takes you first across the flat green expanse of the Sabana de Bogota, the lush, mountain-girt basin that surrounds the capital on three sides. This is followed by a climb over the mountains ringing the city, a descent into the hot Magdalena valley at Girardot, an ascent to the Quindio pass (3,350m above sea level) over the Cordillera Central, the middle of three Andean spurs, a winding descent through the coffee-growing mountains around Armenia and finally a long run through the baking sugar-cane fields that gave Cali its original raison d'être.

Geography made Colombia more like a collection of city-states than a unitary country until quite recently. Regionalism has always been a powerful force in Colombian life, and it lingers on in the psychology of the people. This is particularly so in Medellín, the second city, high up (1,480m) in a valley surrounded by the mountains of Antioquia almost 500km to the northwest of the capital. The city's two and a half million people regard themselves almost as a race apart and are resentful of what they regard as the overweening arrogance of the distant capital. Medellín, like São Paulo in Brazil or Guayaquil in Ecuador, likes to regard itself as the real heart of the country, where wealth is generated and talent is nurtured, only to be appropriated by the undeserving bureaucrats and politicians of Bogotá.

Medellín was founded in 1616, but its wild hinterland was not properly settled, cleared and brought into cultivation until the early nineteenth century. Until then it had been a centre of gold production, some mined and some dredged from the rivers.

River and Coast

The rugged geography meant that for centuries communications between the capital and the outside world were largely confined to river transport, which was slow and hazardous. Bogotá, the highland capital, founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in 1538, was linked to the mother country, Spain, via the Magdalena river, which, with its tributary the Cauca, runs from south to north through the heart of the country. This was the route taken by the produce of the hinterland, and it was also the route of the last journey of General Simón Bolivar, the Liberator, so memorably described by Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning novelist, in The General in his Labyrinth.

The Magdalena valley towns are among the oldest in Colombia: Mompós, founded in 1537, hardly seems to have changed since then. These places had their heyday when imports from Spain were ferried up the river to Bogotá from Cartagena, and later when great rear-wheeled paddle steamers plied this river of shifting sandbanks and tricky currents. Now the unlovely oil-refining town of Barrancabermeja is the main centre for the economically important and chronically violent region known as the Magdalena Medio.

The Caribbean coast is very different from the highlands: hot, with very little variation in temperature. The people, too, are more 'tropical' than the gloomy highlanders, the cachacos. The main port, Cartagena, founded in 1533, was where the Spanish colonial power erected the most impressive fortifications of the entire Spanish Main, to protect its magnificent harbour.

They stand to this day. This was the port from which gold, the main product of colonial New Granada, was exported to Spain. Cartagena's wealth made it an inviting target for foreign marauders, such as Sir Francis Drake, who sacked the city in 1586.

Cartagena is now being developed as a tourist resort, with a row of modern hotels stretched out along Bocagrande beach outside the town. Barranquilla, further along the coast by the mouth of the Magdalena, is now much bigger, dirtier and more industrialised. For a while both were overshadowed by Santa Marta, during the marimba (marijuana) boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the traffickers developed their own beach resort at Rodadero. Santa Marta is Colombia's oldest Spanish city, founded in 1526, as the conquerors sought to establish footholds on the Caribbean coast. Its strategic location at the foot of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the isolated clump of towering mountains where much of the weed was grown, briefly gave it the edge and excitement of a gold-rush town.

The Islands

Far out to sea are the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia, more than 1, 700km from Bogotá and a lot closer to the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua than to the Colombian mainland, 700km away. These islands were finally confirmed as Colombian territories under the Bárcenas-Esguerra Treaty of 1928, along with a collection of smaller islands, cays and reefs, and there are still occasional diplomatic incidents between the two countries.

Like the islands and cays of Nicaragua's Miskito coast, the population of San Andrés and Providencia, which totals about 50,000, is largely black and English-speaking, some the descendants of English Puritan settlers, pirates and African slaves. There has been a big influx of mainlanders in recent years and the racial mix is changing, particularly on San Andrés. But earlier attempts to replace the English language and Protestant (especially Baptist) religions with Spanish and Catholicism have been dropped.

San Andrés was declared a freeport in 1968, in an attempt to compete with islands such as Curaçao and Aruba, and has become a centre of sun-and-shopping tourism for Colombians keen to stock up on duty-free electronic equipment. Many of the recent hotel and resort developments have the ostentatious vulgarity that only drug money can impart, and the US has become increasingly concerned about the role of the islands as platforms for trans-shipment of cocaine to Mexico and the US.

Providencia is different: smaller ( 4,500 people), less developed, and with a local council and civic movement determined to save it from the excesses of neighbouring San Andrés.

Frontiers, Plains and Jungles

Back on the mainland, the country's other great regional urban centres are Bucaramanga and Cucuta, capitals of Santander and Norte de Santander departments respectively. These are the main economic and political centres for eastern...