Colombia lies at the north-western corner of South America, the only country of the continent with coasts on both the Caribbean and the Pacific. Three ranges of the Andes divide it into high basins and the valleys of the Magdalena and the Cauca, which open onto the Caribbean lowlands, the eastern plains of the Llanos and the Amazon rainforest. Hunters lived on the Bogotá savanna by the end of the Ice Age; later the sculptors of San Agustín, the goldsmiths of Calima, Quimbaya and the Zenú, the Tairona of the Sierra Nevada and the Muisca of the eastern highlands, whose offerings at Lake Guatavita inspired the legend of El Dorado, created some of the most remarkable societies of the Americas.

Spanish explorers reached the coast in 1499. Santa Marta and Cartagena were founded in 1525 and 1533, and in 1538 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada conquered the Muisca and founded Santa Fe de Bogotá. As the New Kingdom of Granada and, from 1717, the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the colony lived on gold mined by Indigenous and enslaved African labour, while fortified Cartagena guarded the Caribbean trade. The cry of independence of 20 July 1810 was followed by civil war and Spanish reconquest, until Bolívar's victory at Boyacá in 1819 created Gran Colombia.

After Gran Colombia broke apart in 1830, New Granada passed through liberal reforms, the abolition of slavery and federal experiments before the centralist Constitution of 1886, which lasted until 1991. The Thousand Days' War and the loss of Panama in 1903 were followed by the coffee economy, La Violencia and the power-sharing National Front, and from the 1960s by guerrilla war, paramilitaries and the drug cartels. The Constitution of 1991 and the peace accord of 2016 with the FARC opened a new era, and in 2026 Abelardo de la Espriella succeeded Gustavo Petro, the country's first leftist president.

Explore the ten ages below through selected events from the timeline.