the El Dorado to Chía route page<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhat Chía actually is, in official figures<\/h2>\n
The municipality’s own Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial puts Chía at 2.562 metres above sea level<\/strong>, with an average temperature of 13,4 degrees Celsius<\/strong> and an extension of approximately 7.923 hectares<\/strong>, 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\nThat altitude matters more than the distance. The Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá puts the savanna’s average height at 2.600 metres<\/strong> and the capital’s mean temperature at 14 degrees<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\nEight 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/strong>. 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<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\nThe name, and the moon<\/h2>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The museum that has been shut since 2012<\/h2>\n
This is the single most useful thing on this page, and no English-language guide we can find says it.<\/p>\n
The Hacienda Yerbabuena<\/strong>, 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.<\/em> The roofs failed, the doors shut, and they have not opened since.<\/p>\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
The Caro y Cuervo museum still open to the public is not in Chía at all. It is the Casa de los Cuervo Urisarri<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\nThe Yerbabuena estate itself was declared a national monument by Decreto 505 del 13 de febrero de 1986<\/strong>. The declaration protects the building. It does not open it.<\/p>\nAndrés Carne de Res, and what it does not publish<\/h2>\n
Almost everyone who travels to Chía is going to one restaurant, and the restaurant is not especially interested in helping you plan.<\/p>\n
We checked the company’s own site. It names the original in Chía, Andrés D.C.<\/strong> in Bogotá at Calle 82 número 11-15, four La Plaza de Andrés<\/strong> 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.<\/strong><\/p>\nThat 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.<\/p>\n
Bogotá’s own late night is a separate subject with its own rules, and we keep that on the Bogotá nightlife guide<\/a> rather than duplicating it here.<\/p>\nThree national monuments, and the dates they were declared<\/h2>\n
Chía has three declared properties, and the municipal heritage annex to the POT gives the instrument for each.<\/p>\n
The Puente del Común, Decreto 1584 del 11 de agosto de 1975.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\nThe Hacienda Yerbabuena, Decreto 505 del 13 de febrero de 1986.<\/strong> The estate described above, whose museum has been closed to the public since 2012.<\/p>\nThe La Caro railway station, Decreto 746 del 24 de abril de 1996.<\/strong> It is the least visited of the three, and the one about to become interesting again.<\/p>\nLa Caro, and the train that is coming back<\/h2>\n
Chía’s own Alcaldía published, on 7 May 2026, that the municipality is joining a Plan de Movilidad Sostenible 2025-2037<\/strong>, a twelve-year mobility roadmap. In that announcement it states plainly that the Regiotram del Norte<\/strong>, the Zipaquirá to Bogotá train, will be a reality, that the project will have seven stations<\/strong> in total between Bogotá and Zipaquirá, and that Chía contará con una estación en el sector de La Caro<\/em>.<\/p>\nRead 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Getting there, and the forty-minute number<\/h2>\n
Here is the figure that should shape your day, and it comes from the municipality rather than from us.<\/p>\n
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<\/strong> — a journey that without congestion takes between seven and ten minutes<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
Three toll plazas sit between El Dorado and Chía on the northern accesses: Andes, Fusca and Unisabana<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n\n