Chía, Colombia: What Is Open, What Is Closed, and the Drive from Bogotá

Chía is thirty-one kilometres from Bogotá and most of what English guides send you there to see is either shut or unpublished. The Instituto Caro y Cuervo closed its museum at Yerbabuena in 2012 and it has not reopened. The restaurant everyone actually comes for publishes neither a street address nor an opening hour. And the Alcaldía’s own figure for the drive in at peak is forty minutes for a stretch that takes seven to ten when the road is clear. What follows is the verifiable part: three national monuments with their decree numbers, a census against a newer municipal projection, five years of police counts, and a railway coming back to a station Colombia declared a monument thirty years ago.

The short version

Chía is a half-day, not a weekend, and for most travellers it is an evening. Go for dinner, go for the bridge, and go knowing that the Yerbabuena museum you may have read about is closed. Leave Bogotá outside the peak if you possibly can, because the last few kilometres are the slow part and the municipality has said so in writing.

We do not publish a journey time here. That number is set by Bogotá traffic rather than by distance, and it belongs on a page we can keep current: the toll table, the two roads north and the pico y placa calendar all live on the El Dorado to Chía route page.

What Chía actually is, in official figures

The municipality’s own Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial puts Chía at 2.562 metres above sea level, with an average temperature of 13,4 degrees Celsius and an extension of approximately 7.923 hectares, which is a little over seventy-nine square kilometres. It borders Cajicá to the north, Sopó to the east, Bogotá and Cota to the south, and Tabio and Tenjo to the west. The same document gives the distance to Bogotá as 31 kilómetros.

That altitude matters more than the distance. The Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá puts the savanna’s average height at 2.600 metres and the capital’s mean temperature at 14 degrees. Chía, by its own POT, is 2.562 metres and 13,4 degrees. Thirty-eight metres lower and a little over half a degree cooler: there is no descent, no warming and no relief from the altitude. People who expect a valley are surprised.

Eight veredas make up the rural municipality, and the POT names them for the river that shaped them: La Balsa, Bojacá, Cerca de Piedra, Fagua, Fonqueta, Fusca, Tiquiza and Yerbabuena. Two of those names will reappear later on this page, one on a toll plaza and one on a closed museum.

For population there are two official numbers and they are eight years apart. The DANE census of 2018 counted 129.613 people and adjusted that for undercount to 132.181. The Alcaldía’s own governing programme for 2024 to 2027 cites the DANE projection for 2023: 158.258 habitantes, of whom 133.854 live in the cabecera and 24.404 in the centros poblados and dispersed rural area. That is roughly a twenty percent increase over the adjusted census figure in five years, and it works out at about two thousand people per square kilometre. Chía is a town that is filling in fast, not a village.

The name, and the moon

Chía is the Muisca word for the moon, and it was a deity before it was a municipality. The Banco de la República’s own encyclopaedia, describing the loss of Muisca religious practice along the Bogotá river, records that the people stopped singing praises in honour of their gods Chía, the moon, and Xué, the sun.

You will see the town marketed as the City of the Moon on signage and merchandise. That part is modern branding rather than anything an institution has declared, and we flag it as such. The etymology itself is solid and comes from a state source.

The museum that has been shut since 2012

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and no English-language guide we can find says it.

The Hacienda Yerbabuena, at kilometre 9 plus 300 metres on the road north out of Bogotá, is the seat of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Colombia’s national institute for language and literature. It housed a museum. On the institute’s own museums page, the sentence reads: El museo cerró sus puertas al público en 2012 por problemas estructurales en las cubiertas del inmueble. The roofs failed, the doors shut, and they have not opened since.

The institute publishes a restoration timeline in three phases running from 2013 to 2016, and states that the design and implementation of a new museographic script was planned for 2017 and 2018. It gives no reopening date. As of this writing the museum remains listed as closed to the public and the offices at Yerbabuena keep weekday hours only, Monday to Friday, eight in the morning to five in the afternoon.

The Caro y Cuervo museum still open to the public is not in Chía at all. It is the Casa de los Cuervo Urisarri, the Museo Literario de Cundinamarca, at Calle 10 número 4-69 in Bogotá, Monday to Friday from nine to five. If you came to Colombia for the Caro y Cuervo collection, that is the address to write down, and it is in the city rather than north of it.

The Yerbabuena estate itself was declared a national monument by Decreto 505 del 13 de febrero de 1986. The declaration protects the building. It does not open it.

Andrés Carne de Res, and what it does not publish

Almost everyone who travels to Chía is going to one restaurant, and the restaurant is not especially interested in helping you plan.

We checked the company’s own site. It names the original in Chía, Andrés D.C. in Bogotá at Calle 82 número 11-15, four La Plaza de Andrés locations in the El Retiro, Gran Estación, Hacienda Santa Bárbara and Santafé shopping centres, plus Andrés Paradero, Andrés Express, Andrés Cartagena, Andrés Medellín and La Casa que Casa. No street address is published for the Chía original beyond the name of the municipality, and no opening hours are published for any location.

That is a deliberate posture rather than an oversight, and it has a practical consequence: every set of hours you find for Chía on a third-party listing is somebody’s guess or somebody’s memory. We do not reproduce them here. If your evening depends on the door being open, confirm it with the restaurant on the day, and build the return drive into the plan before you order the second aguardiente.

Bogotá’s own late night is a separate subject with its own rules, and we keep that on the Bogotá nightlife guide rather than duplicating it here.

Three national monuments, and the dates they were declared

Chía has three declared properties, and the municipal heritage annex to the POT gives the instrument for each.

The Puente del Común, Decreto 1584 del 11 de agosto de 1975. The POT records that its construction dates from 1796 and that it holds historical and aesthetic values. Read that date again. The bridge was standing more than twenty years before Colombia existed as a republic, and it is the oldest thing in Chía with a decree attached to it.

The Hacienda Yerbabuena, Decreto 505 del 13 de febrero de 1986. The estate described above, whose museum has been closed to the public since 2012.

The La Caro railway station, Decreto 746 del 24 de abril de 1996. It is the least visited of the three, and the one about to become interesting again.

La Caro, and the train that is coming back

Chía’s own Alcaldía published, on 7 May 2026, that the municipality is joining a Plan de Movilidad Sostenible 2025-2037, a twelve-year mobility roadmap. In that announcement it states plainly that the Regiotram del Norte, the Zipaquirá to Bogotá train, will be a reality, that the project will have seven stations in total between Bogotá and Zipaquirá, and that Chía contará con una estación en el sector de La Caro.

Read that against the 1996 decree. The sector Colombia declared a national monument for its railway station thirty years ago is the sector the new regional railway will stop in. The Alcaldía’s stated aim is intermodality, feeding the station with local public transport and bicycles.

We are not going to tell you the train is running, because it is not, and construction timelines on Colombian rail projects move. What we will tell you is that the corridor is live policy rather than nostalgia, and that if you are interested in why a monument-listed station sits in a field in Chía, this is the answer.

Getting there, and the forty-minute number

Here is the figure that should shape your day, and it comes from the municipality rather than from us.

In its announcement on the widening of Avenida Pradilla, the Alcaldía de Chía states that at peak hour a citizen can take some forty minutes to travel from the peaje Los Andes to the McDonald’s roundabout — a journey that without congestion takes between seven and ten minutes. That is the municipality’s own arithmetic on its own main road, and it is the single most honest sentence published about getting into Chía.

The implication is not that Chía is far. It is that the distance is irrelevant and the hour is everything. A Friday evening arrival and a Tuesday morning arrival are different trips over identical ground.

Three toll plazas sit between El Dorado and Chía on the northern accesses: Andes, Fusca and Unisabana. One of those names belongs to Chía itself: Fusca is one of the eight veredas the POT lists. The current rates, the two alternative roads and the pico y placa rules that decide whether your own car may even make the trip are all on the route page, where we can update them when they change.

Avenida Pradilla is about to be rebuilt

On 11 September 2026 the Alcaldía announced that Avenida Pradilla, the main road through Chía, will go from four lanes to eight — from two per direction to four. The project covers 1.040 metres exactly, from Centro Chía to the junction with the Cota-Chía variante, at an estimated investment of $130.000 millones. Construction, the municipality says, would begin at the start of 2027.

No completion date was given and no contractor was named. Take the practical reading: the road into Chía is congested enough that the municipality is spending $130.000 millones on one kilometre of it, and from early 2027 that kilometre becomes a worksite. If you are planning a trip for 2027 or 2028, ask us what the road is doing before you fix the timing.

Is Chía safe

We use Colombia's own police open data rather than impressions. These are the recorded counts for the municipality, code 25175, from the Policía Nacional's published datasets, which currently run to 31 July 2026.

Homicides: 7 in 2022, 3 in 2023, 6 in 2024, 8 in 2025, and 2 in the first seven months of 2026. Four full years averages six a year. In a municipality the Alcaldía puts at more than a hundred and fifty thousand people, that is a low number in absolute terms and it has not trended anywhere in particular.

Theft from the person: 1.596 in 2022, 1.792 in 2023, 1.614 in 2024, 1.499 in 2025, and 797 in the first seven months of 2026. The peak was 2023. The 2025 figure is about sixteen percent below that peak and the lowest of the four complete years. Expressed as a daily rate, 2025 ran at roughly four reported thefts a day; the 2026 partial year is running at about three point eight a day, slightly below that.

Read that the way you would read it for anywhere else. Petty theft is the crime a visitor is realistically exposed to, it happens several times a day in Chía, and crowds are where it happens. The datasets do not break victims out by nationality or residence, so we will not tell you what share of either figure involved visitors. The safety habits that apply in Bogotá apply here unchanged, and we set those out on the Bogotá safety page.

The denominator problem, and why to distrust any rate you read

You will find Chía crime rates quoted per hundred thousand inhabitants. Treat them with suspicion, including ours if we published one, which is why we have not.

The two official population figures for this municipality are 132.181, the 2018 census adjusted for undercount, and 158.258, the DANE projection for 2023 as cited by the Alcaldía. Those are twenty percent apart. A theft rate computed on the first is twenty percent higher than the same count computed on the second, and almost no page that quotes a rate tells you which it used or which year the denominator belongs to.

So we publish counts and trends, both from the same dataset, and we give you the population figures separately with their dates attached. You can do the division yourself if you want it, and you will know exactly what you divided by.

When to go

The hour of the day matters more than the month. Chía sits on the Bogotá savanna and its weather is the savanna's weather — the POT's average of 13,4 degrees holds all year, with rain rather than seasons.

Avoid Friday and Saturday evenings if your interest is the bridge, the station or the rural veredas, because the whole of north Bogotá is going the same way you are. Choose them if your interest is the restaurant, because that is when it is itself. Those are two different trips and it is worth deciding which you are taking before you book a car.

What we do differently

We check what is open before you go rather than after. The Yerbabuena museum is the example: it has been closed for more than a decade and it is still recommended in print, and a traveller who drove out for it lost an afternoon to a page nobody updated.

We also refuse to invent the numbers other pages invent. No journey time, no restaurant hours, no crime rate built on a denominator we cannot name. Where a figure exists and an institution published it, we quote the institution and the instrument. Where it does not, we say so, which is a shorter page and a more useful one.

Questions travelers ask

Can I visit the Caro y Cuervo museum in Chía? No. The institute's own museums page states the museum closed to the public in 2012 because of structural problems in the building's roofs, and publishes no reopening date. The Caro y Cuervo museum that is open is the Casa de los Cuervo Urisarri at Calle 10 número 4-69 in Bogotá, weekdays nine to five.

What time does Andrés Carne de Res open? The company does not publish opening hours for any of its locations, and does not publish a street address for the Chía original. Confirm with the restaurant directly on the day you intend to go.

How long does the drive take? It depends entirely on the hour, and the municipality has put a number on the worst case: about forty minutes from the peaje Los Andes to the McDonald's roundabout at peak, against seven to ten minutes clear. We plan around the hour rather than the distance.

Is Chía worth a whole day? For most travellers, no. It is a half-day for the bridge and the rural side, or an evening for dinner. People combine it with something further north, and the salt cathedral is the usual choice — that is on our Zipaquirá guide.

Does the Regiotram reach Chía? Not yet. The Alcaldía has confirmed that the Regiotram del Norte will have seven stations between Bogotá and Zipaquirá and that Chía's will be in the La Caro sector. There is no passenger service today.

Is it higher or lower than Bogotá? Slightly lower. Chía's POT gives 2.562 metres and the Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá puts the savanna's average at 2.600. Thirty-eight metres is nothing, and altitude affects you the same way in both.

Plan it with us

Tell us which Chía you want — the monuments and the veredas in daylight, or the long dinner and the drive home — because they need different departure times and different cars. If Chía is one stop on a Bogotá week, the rest of that week is on our Bogotá guide, the day out east is on the La Chorrera page, and everything else we have written is in the guides library. The drive itself is on Safe Transfers, with the tolls and pico y placa kept current there. We do not run a Chía tour as such; what we run is the day around it, and those are on our Bogotá tours page.

Sources

Alcaldía Municipal de Chía, Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial, Análisis del Riesgo del Municipio de Chía, for the altitude, the extension, the average temperature, the boundaries, the distance to Bogotá and the eight veredas. Alcaldía Municipal de Chía, POT, Patrimonio Cultural, for the three declarations and their decree numbers and dates, and for the 1796 construction date of the Puente del Común. Programa de Gobierno Chía Cundinamarca 2024-2027, for the DANE 2023 population projection and its urban and rural split. DANE, Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda 2018, municipal profile for Chía, code 25175, for the counted and adjusted population. Instituto Caro y Cuervo, museums page, for the 2012 closure and its stated cause, the restoration phases, the Yerbabuena address and office hours, and the address and hours of the Casa de los Cuervo Urisarri. Alcaldía de Chía, announcement of 11 September 2026 on Avenida Pradilla, for the lane count, the 1.040 metres, the investment figure, the 2027 start and the peak-hour travel time between the peaje Los Andes and the McDonald's roundabout. Alcaldía de Chía, announcement of 7 May 2026 on the Plan de Movilidad Sostenible 2025-2037, for the Regiotram del Norte, its seven stations and the La Caro station. Policía Nacional de Colombia, open data on homicides and theft from the person, municipal code 25175, records to 31 July 2026. Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, Información General de Bogotá, for the savanna's average altitude and the capital's mean temperature. Banco de la República, Enciclopedia de la Red Cultural, on the Muisca deities Chía and Xué. Andrés Carne de Res, own website, for the locations listed and for the absence of published addresses and hours. The municipality's own tourism subdomain disallows automated access, so nothing on this page is taken from it.