September 14, 2026
Girardot is where Bogotá goes to be warm. It sits on the Magdalena at the point where the river becomes the boundary between Cundinamarca and Tolima, it was built by a railway that no longer runs, and on a Friday afternoon the road down to it carries most of the capital. It is not a pretty colonial town and it does not pretend to be. What it has is a river, a market building that is a national monument, and heat.
The short version
Come for the market, the river and the railway, and understand that you are visiting a working hot-country city rather than a preserved one. The Plaza de Mercado, designed by Leopoldo Rother and declared a national monument in 1993, is the single best reason to make the trip and it costs nothing to walk into.
Go midweek if you can. The Bogotá–Girardot corridor on a Friday afternoon or a Monday holiday evening is a different road from the one you drove on a Tuesday, and no amount of planning fixes that.
What Girardot is
The town began as a river crossing. The municipality’s own history records that a man from Tocaima, Pastor Montero, started ferrying travellers across the Magdalena by canoe; before that the Spanish had called the spot “Puerto de las canoas” in 1545, and later it was “el paso de la canoa de Montero”, then “El paso de Flandes”. It was also called “La chivatera” for the goats kept there. Early crops were tobacco and maize.
In 1844 Ramón Bueno and José Triana donated land for a parish. On 9 October 1852 the Provincial Chamber of Tequendama, meeting at La Mesa, created the Parish District of Girardot. We will note that ProColombia, the state tourism agency, instead gives a founding date of 27 May 1881 and says the name honours Atanasio Girardot, the independence officer. The two official sources do not agree and we are not going to pick one for you.
The 2018 national census counted 101,018 people in the municipality, 95,427 of them in the city itself. In 2005 the figure was 95,496.
The heat, and a figure worth questioning
Girardot’s own Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial puts the city at 288.926 metres above sea level. The regional environmental authority, CAR Cundinamarca, records the river’s maximum level in the urban zone at 275 metres.
On temperature we have to be careful with you. ProColombia publishes an average of 23 °C, and the Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá repeats that number. Neither is a meteorological authority, and we could not obtain a figure for Girardot from IDEAM, the Alcaldía de Girardot or the Gobernación de Cundinamarca. What we can tell you from CAR’s own regional climate classification is that this zone — below 2,300 metres — has average temperatures above 24 °C and annual rainfall between 1,000 and 2,000 millimetres, and that CAR classifies sectors of Girardot as tropical dry forest. Treat 23 °C as the published figure rather than as a promise about your afternoon.
The road from Bogotá
The corridor is Ruta Nacional 40. The concessionaire, Vía Sumapaz, operated by VINCI Highways, describes it as 145 kilometres across 13 municipalities in Cundinamarca and Tolima, with toll plazas at Chusacá and Chinauta. As of October 2025 the concessionaire reported the expansion works finished and in a verification phase at roughly 80 per cent, making minor adjustments and corrections.
That road is the whole story of a Girardot weekend. The concessionaire publishes live incidents — in the days before this guide was written, a restricted lane at kilometre 29 near Melgar after a collision, and a restricted section at kilometre 24 at Tolemaida after a truck rolled. Its emergency lines are 310 4224687, 311 7872339 and 018000 180305.
Book the drive to Girardot
A hundred and forty-five kilometres of concession road, two tolls, and a Friday afternoon that behaves nothing like a Tuesday one. We leave at a time that suits the road rather than the clock, and the price is agreed before you get in.
Toll rates, the reversible-lane measures and the full corridor detail are on Safe Transfers: Bogotá to Girardot.
The market that is a national monument
This is the thing worth planning around. The Plaza de Mercado de Girardot, between carreras 9 and 10 and calles 10 and 11, was declared a national monument by Decreto 1932 of 24 September 1993. That decree declared exactly two buildings in the country: this one and the Edificio Nacional of Barranquilla. Its management and protection plan was approved by Resolución 1743 of 15 September 2020.
The Ministry of Culture calls it "uno de los proyectos más emblemáticos de la arquitectura del periodo moderno en Colombia". It was designed by Leopold Rother, the German-born architect who left Europe ahead of the Nazis and spent his career building modern Colombia. The Gobernación de Cundinamarca's own radio station describes it as built between 1946 and 1948: a square plan, four large staircases at the corners rising to the second level, a concrete structure with no perimeter walls at all so that air moves through it. In a city this hot, that is not a stylistic choice. It is free to walk into.
One note on dates: the Gobernación's station says the building was declared a monument in 1990, while the Ministry of Culture's legal compilation gives the 1993 decree. Both reported, neither resolved.
The railway, and why the town exists
Girardot is a railway town that lost its railway. The Banco de la República's history of Colombian railways records that the line was authorised in 1873 and begun in 1881 by the engineer Francisco Javier Cisneros, with the explicit purpose of connecting Bogotá to the Magdalena. It reached Apulo by 1888. Then it nearly stopped: only ten kilometres of track were added in the twelve years between 1895 and 1909 for lack of money. In 1909 it finally reached Facatativá and joined the Ferrocarril de la Sabana. It was absorbed into the national railways in 1953.
What that line did, in the bank's words, was take the mules out of the transport chain between the coast and the capital. Everything that had come up the river and gone overland by mule now came up the river and went by train.
The Girardot railway station is a declared national monument. Decreto 746 of 24 April 1996 declared the country's set of railway stations as a group; a second station in the municipality, Estación Yesal, carries the same declaration.
The bridges
The railway bridge over the Magdalena was contracted in 1923, during the presidency of Miguel Abadía Méndez, with Sir W.G. Armstrong Whitworth & Company Limited. It was inaugurated in 1930 and joined the Girardot railway to the Tolima–Huila line.
It is also protected in its own right. Resolución 800 of 31 July 1998 declared the Facatativá–Girardot railway corridor a Bien de Interés Cultural of national character, running from the Facatativá station to the bridge over the Magdalena at Girardot, bridge included. The corridor is 132 kilometres long, was built between 1882 and 1909, crosses nine municipalities and links twenty-five declared stations. Any work on it requires Ministry of Culture authorisation.
The road bridge is a different matter. The Puente Mariano Ospina Pérez, linking Girardot to Flandes, was closed by the national government from 17 July to 17 August 2021 because of severe deterioration and corrosion of its structural anchors. At the time it was carrying roughly 48,000 vehicles a day, and it was described as more than seventy years old. Traffic was sent via Chicoral and Espinal–Tocaima; pedestrians were sent to the railway bridge about 550 metres downstream.
We could not establish its current status from any official source — whether it is open, to which classes of vehicle, or under what weight limit. The relevant ANI notices now return errors. If your plan depends on crossing it, check on the day.
Melgar, and the weekend
Most people who say Girardot mean the whole hot-country corridor, and that includes Melgar, in Tolima, forty minutes back up the road. Melgar's own development plan calls it what everyone else calls it: "la Ciudad de las piscinas", the city of swimming pools, or "el mar de piscinas".
The regional environmental authority CORTOLIMA puts Melgar's town centre at 349 metres and its temperature range at 28 °C to 34 °C, averaging 30 °C on the flat. The 2018 census counted 34,136 residents. The municipality's own figures on distance to Bogotá disagree with each other — 108.9 kilometres in one document, 116 in another.
The number that explains Melgar is a different one. The municipality estimated its floating population — visitors, not residents — at 74,443 for 2015, against a resident population then of about 35,000. Melgar is a town of roughly thirty-five thousand people built to receive twice that many at a weekend.
When to go, and when not to
IDEAM's picture for the Alto Magdalena: July is part of the mid-year dry season, with a marked drop in rain compared with June, and by mid-September the second rainy season begins. The first rainy season across the Andean region runs from mid-March to mid-June.
The more useful advice is about the calendar rather than the weather. Avoid the Friday afternoon exodus and the Monday evening return on a puente. During holiday peaks the concessionaire runs contraflow with reversible lanes and coordinates with the traffic police; that is a sign of how much traffic the road takes, not a reason to relax about it.
The Reinado Nacional del Turismo
Girardot's festival is the Reinado Nacional del Turismo, run by the Alcaldía and the Instituto Municipal de Turismo, Cultura y Fomento. The 2025 edition ran from 10 to 12 October, with the Camellón del Comercio and the Avenida Ciudad de las Acacias as its venues. The 48th edition, in 2018, ran from 8 to 15 October. The dates move; check with the Instituto before booking around it.
A day that works
Arrive early. Walk the Plaza de Mercado while it is trading and before the heat, which means before about ten. Then the Camellón del Comercio and the riverfront, then the railway station. Eat, and spend the middle of the day in water or indoors, because that is what the city is built around. Go back to the river in the late afternoon.
If you are making a weekend of it, Melgar and Girardot work together: the pools in one, the market and the river in the other.
What we do differently
We do not run a guided tour in Girardot and we are not going to invent one. What we do is the drive, which on this corridor is the part that actually decides your day. A private car, a driver briefed on the route that morning, a fixed price with the tolls in it, and stops quoted into the plan rather than charged after.
If you want Melgar on the way, or a late return so you get the river at the right hour, say so when you book and we will build it that way.
Questions travelers ask
Is Girardot safe? Neither the UK Foreign Office nor the US State Department lists Cundinamarca or Girardot among the areas it advises against travelling to. Locally, a municipal decree of April 2026 restricts motorcycle circulation in the urban zone between midnight and five in the morning and limits male pillion passengers — we have that from regional radio and the Alcaldía's own social media rather than from the published decree, so treat the detail as press-sourced. It is the kind of measure that tells you where the city puts its attention.
Is there a museum? Not one we can point you to. We searched official municipal and national sources and found none. The Casa de la Cultura is the nearest institution and no official source describes it as a museum.
Can I swim in the Magdalena? This is a large river with current and commercial traffic. The pools are the reason Melgar exists; use those.
How long is the drive? We are not publishing a figure we cannot source. The corridor is 145 kilometres end to end by the concessionaire's own description, and the time it takes depends almost entirely on the day of the week.
The other places people go for heat
Girardot is the closest of the hot-country runs and the one that fills first. Honda sits further round on the Magdalena, older, and quieter for it. The Tatacoa Desert is a longer drive and a different kind of day entirely. Which month you go is the decision that matters most, and that is in when to visit Colombia; the drive starts in Bogotá.
Plan it with us
The road is the variable on this trip, which makes it the thing worth arranging. Every route out of the capital is on Bogotá transfers, with the booking widget on the page. Girardot is not one of our products; the days we do run from the capital are on our Bogotá tours page.
Sources
Ministerio de Cultura: Decreto 1932 de 1993 (Plaza de Mercado de Girardot), Resolución 1743 de 2020 (PEMP), Resolución 800 de 1998 (Corredor Férreo Facatativá–Girardot), and Resolución 1230 de 2017 citing Decreto 746 de 1996 (estaciones del ferrocarril). Alcaldía de Girardot, "Pasado, Presente y Futuro", and Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial, Acuerdo 029 de 2000. DANE, Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda 2018, perfil municipal 25307, and Censo General 2005. Banco de la República, "Ferrocarril de Girardot". CAR Cundinamarca, clasificación climática regional. Ministerio de Transporte, cierre del Puente Mariano Ospina Pérez, 2021. Concesión Vía 40 Express / Vía Sumapaz, estado del corredor y líneas de emergencia. IDEAM, boletín 233 and temporadas de lluvias 2025. CORTOLIMA, Plan de Contingencia Municipal Simplificado en Incendios Forestales — Melgar. Alcaldía de Melgar, Plan de Desarrollo 2020–2023 and Generalidades. Gobernación de Cundinamarca, El Dorado Radio, on the Plaza de Mercado. ProColombia, ficha de Girardot. UK FCDO and US Department of State Colombia travel advice. The April 2026 municipal public-order decree is reported from regional radio and the Alcaldía's social media, and is flagged as such in the text.