Chicamocha National Park (Panachi)

Chicamocha National Park (Panachi) tickets and tours: which one to book

Chicamocha National Park, universally known by its acronym Panachi, is not a national park in the conservation sense at all, and visitors should know it before they go: it is a leisure and theme park, opened by the department of Santander in 2006, built on a ridge on the rim of the Chicamocha canyon beside the main highway between Bucaramanga, an hour and a quarter away, and San Gil, an hour, in the Colombian Andes. What it offers is access to the view, and above all a cable car. The entrance ticket comes in two versions, with and without the teleférico, and the one with it is the reason for coming: a gondola of 6.3 kilometres, among the longest in South America, which drops from the park down to the river at the bottom of the canyon, at a station called Río, and climbs the other side to the Mesa de los Santos, a ride of some twenty-five to thirty minutes each way over an immense arid gorge.

In the park itself there are viewpoints, a large bronze monument to the Santander rebels of 1781, a replica colonial village with shops and restaurants, an ostrich and goat farm, zip lines, a giant swing over the void, an ice rink, buggies, and an Acuaparque of pools and slides with its own ticket, all of it aimed at Colombian families. Tandem paragliding over the canyon, launched from a site beside the highway a few kilometres away, is run by separate operators and is the most thrilling way to see it. The tours from San Gil, Barichara and Bucaramanga bundle transport and tickets, and the trekking tours descend the canyon itself on old stone paths, from Los Santos to the hamlet of Jordán and up to Villanueva and Barichara, two days of hot, steep, magnificent walking.

Visiting Chicamocha National Park (Panachi): what you will see

The Chicamocha river has cut, through the eastern range of the Colombian Andes in the department of Santander, a canyon some 227 kilometres long and up to two thousand metres deep, the second largest in the world by some measures of volume, and at the point where the park stands the drop from the rim to the river is about 1,100 metres. It lies in the rain shadow of the surrounding mountains, and the landscape is a surprise in so green a country: a semi-desert of ochre and rust-coloured slopes, deeply gullied, dotted with columnar cacti, agaves, acacias and the pot-bellied ceiba barrigona, a swollen-trunked tree found only in this canyon, with goats picking among the rocks, hot by day and windy in the afternoon, with the river a brown thread far below. The canyon is the home of several birds found nowhere else, the Niceforo's wren and the chestnut-bellied hummingbird among them, both endangered.

The Guane people, who farmed cotton and tobacco on its terraces, left rock paintings, and their stone-paved paths, rebuilt in the nineteenth century by a German engineer and trader, Geo von Lengerke, who made a fortune in quinine and built roads and bridges across Santander, are the trails that walkers follow today between Barichara, Guane, Jordán and Los Santos. The monument on the park's highest point, by the sculptor Luis Guillermo Vallejo, shaped like a tobacco leaf and carrying thirty-five bronze figures, commemorates the Revolt of the Comuneros of 1781, which began in the nearby town of Socorro as a protest against Spanish taxes, led in its first hours by a market woman, Manuela Beltrán, and is remembered as a forerunner of independence. On the Mesa de los Santos, across the canyon, are coffee farms, a weekend market of local produce, and holiday houses in a cool climate. Santander's other claim to fame, the hormiga culona, a large-bottomed ant toasted and eaten as a snack, is sold at the park.

Chicamocha National Park (Panachi): best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open from about 10 am to 6 pm from Wednesday to Friday and 9 am to 7 pm at weekends and on holidays, and is normally closed on Mondays and Tuesdays except in holiday seasons, when it opens daily; check before travelling, since the cable car also closes for maintenance and in high wind. The canyon is hot and dry all year, around 30 degrees at the rim and more at the river, with the drier months from December to March and in July and August, which give the clearest air.

Mornings are calmer and clearer; the wind rises after midday. Colombian holidays, Easter, late December and early January, bring long queues for the cable car. Allow four to five hours. San Gil, the adventure-sports capital, is an hour south, Barichara, the most beautiful colonial village in Colombia, twenty minutes beyond it, and Bucaramanga an hour and a quarter north.