September 11, 2026
La Guajira is the desert at the top of the map, the peninsula that Colombia shares with Venezuela and that the Wayuu, the most numerous indigenous people in the country, have never stopped owning: three hundred millimeters of rain a year on its northern coast, wind that does not stop, salt flats, flamingos, a cape the Wayuu call the land of the dead, and the northernmost point of the South American mainland at the end of a track that a car cannot drive. It is one of the most beautiful places in Colombia and one of the poorest, and an honest page has to say both. This is what we tell our own guests before they book the three days: what the region is and who lives in it, by the census and the court that ruled on their children, how you get there and why nothing north of Uribia moves without a four-by-four and a local guide, what Cabo de la Vela, Punta Gallinas, the salt flats and the flamingo sanctuary actually are, the weather by IDEAM’s own stations in the desert, what a night in a hammock on a ranchería is like, whether it is safe, and the rules of the people whose land you are crossing.
The beach where the road to La Guajira begins is in our Palomino guide; the city most of our guests leave from is in our Santa Marta guide.
The short version
Three days from Santa Marta, two nights in hammocks on Wayuu rancherías, a four-by-four from Uribia on, and a driver who knows the track and the families along it: that is the shape of any honest Guajira trip, and it is the shape of ours, from 1,146 US dollars per person with the guide, the vehicle, eight meals and the two nights. The desert is hot every day of the year, 32 to 35 degrees by IDEAM’s stations, and almost rainless from December to August; September to November is the short wet season, with October the only month that gets real rain. Bring cash, a hat, a scarf for the wind, water for yourself and water to give, and expect no electricity, no phone signal and a bucket for a shower. The flamingo sanctuary at Camarones is free to enter and closed to anyone without a local guide, the Macuira national park is a cloud forest in the middle of the desert eight hours of track from Uribia, and the children who stop your car with a rope across the road are the most visible face of a humanitarian situation the Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional in 2017. Go, spend your money in the rancherías, and go with someone who knows whose land each stretch of the track is.
What La Guajira is, and who lives in it
The department is the peninsula itself, from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada behind Palomino and Riohacha to the point where the mainland ends, and it is divided the way the Wayuu divide it: the Baja Guajira in the south, green and farmed; the Media around Riohacha, Manaure and Uribia; and the Alta, the true desert north of Uribia, where the rancherías, the salt, the wind and the sea are. The 2018 census counted 380,460 people who identify as Wayuu, which makes them, in DANE’s own words, the most numerous indigenous people in the country, with 97.5 percent of them in La Guajira; the municipality of Uribia, which covers the whole Alta Guajira, had 163,462 people, 155,764 of them in the dispersed rural area, and 154,856 of them Wayuu. So the desert is not empty: it is a territory of family settlements called rancherías, five or six houses each by the Procuraduría’s description, spaced apart so the goats do not mix, belonging to matrilineal clans in which the mother’s brother holds the authority. The Wayuu speak Wayuunaiki, 85 percent of them still, and they settle their disputes through the pütchipü’üi, the palabrero, whose normative system UNESCO inscribed on its list of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2010. Cabo de la Vela is Jepira to them, the land of the dead Wayuu, the place the souls go, which is worth knowing before you climb the Pilón de Azúcar for the photograph.
The honest paragraph
In 2017 the Constitutional Court, in Sentencia T-302, declared a state of unconstitutional affairs over the rights of Wayuu children in Riohacha, Manaure, Maicao and Uribia to food, health, drinking water and participation; the ruling is still being enforced, ministry by ministry, and the Ministry of Transport’s share of it is literally the mobility of the rancherías, the tracks you will drive. You will see it. Children will stop the four-by-four with a rope across the track and ask for water, biscuits or sweets, sometimes every few kilometers; the rancherías where you sleep collect rainwater or buy it by the tank; the goats are the savings account. We carry water and something to give at the ropes, we pay the rancherías directly for the nights and the food, we buy the mochilas from the women who wove them, and we do not pretend the desert is only a landscape. If that is not the trip you want, choose the coast; if it is, the Guajira rewards the people who come with their eyes open more than any place we sell.
Getting there, and why the car stops at Uribia
From Santa Marta the road east runs through Palomino to Riohacha, the department capital on the sea, in under three hours by our vehicles; from Riohacha to Uribia, the town that calls itself the indigenous capital of Colombia, Parques Nacionales counts an hour and a half on a paved road. Uribia is where the asphalt ends. Beyond it the Alta Guajira is track, salt flat and sand, and the only vehicles that go north are four-by-fours driven by people who know where the track is this week, because it moves with the rain; the same applies to the boats, which are the other way to reach Punta Gallinas. There is no public transport worth the name north of Uribia, no fuel stations and no phone signal, and the tracks pass through the territories of clans that expect to be asked. That is why every serious operator here, ourselves included, drives with a local driver or guide who knows the track and the families along it, and pays for the passage, and why the national parks in the department, by their own rules, do not let anyone in without a local guide or interpreter.
The places, one by one
Cabo de la Vela. A fishing village of rancherías along a bay of turquoise water on the northwestern shore of the Alta Guajira, and the Guajira most people have seen in photographs: the Pilón de Azúcar, the pyramid hill above a beach of orange sand, sacred to the Wayuu as part of Jepira; the lighthouse on the cape, where the sun goes down into the sea; the Ojo de Agua, a cove with a freshwater seep; and a wind that made the bay one of the kitesurfing places of the Caribbean. The lodging is chinchorros, the wide Wayuu hammocks, under open shelters on the beach, with a bucket shower and a generator for a few hours of light. Our three-day program does not overnight at Cabo de la Vela; it goes to Punta Gallinas by way of Uribia, and if you want the sunset at the cape, ask us about adding a night there.
Punta Gallinas. The northernmost point of the South American mainland, a lighthouse on a headland with the sea on three sides, reached by the Bahía Honda and Bahía Hondita, two bays of shallow water where the desert simply stops at the edge of the sea; the Taroa dunes, walls of orange sand that drop straight into the surf, which you walk down or slide down on a board; and a handful of rancherías that host the visitors who make it this far, with hammocks, goat or fish for dinner and a generator for an hour or two of light before the stars take over. It is the reason to do three days rather than one.
Manaure and Mayapo. Manaure is where the sea is turned into salt: the pans on the shore where Wayuu families rake the crust by hand, the mounds of white against the blue, and the salt that has been the Wayuu’s trade for as long as anyone has written about them. Mayapo, on the coast of the same municipality, is the beach day at the end of our program, a long strand with wind and a lunch of fish. Both are on the way and both are on our itinerary.
The flamingo sanctuary. The Santuario de Fauna y Flora Los Flamencos, at Camarones just west of Riohacha, is 7,033.89 hectares and four coastal lagoons, Chentico, Navío Quebrado, Laguna Grande and Manzanillo, declared on June 6, 1977 and overlapped with the Perratpu reserve of the Wayuu communities of Tocoromana, Loma Fresca and Chentico. Parques Nacionales charges no entrance fee, opens it from 7 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, and prohibits entry without a local guide or interpreter, which in practice means the Wayuu boatmen who pole the flat canoes across the lagoon toward the birds. The flamingos are there all year to feed on the brine shrimp, in numbers that change with the season and the water level, and no one can promise you how many. Our half-day at Camarones is from Riohacha and is on the card below.
The Macuira. The other national park in the department is the strangest one in Colombia: a cloud forest below 600 meters, on a small range at the far northeastern end of the peninsula, that Parques Nacionales calls the only source of fresh water in the Alta Guajira, 25,000 hectares declared on the same day in 1977 and overlapped entirely with the Wayuu reserve of the Alta and Media Guajira. It is reached from Nazareth, eight to nine hours of track from Uribia by the park’s own estimate, only with an accredited guide or interpreter, one for every six people, and without an entrance fee; it has 140 bird species with seven endemic subspecies and a frog, Allobates wayuu, that lives nowhere else. It is not on our three-day program and it is not a place for a first trip; it is the reason to come back for a week.
How our three days go
Day one: pickup at your hotel in Santa Marta, the road east past Palomino to Riohacha in under three hours, the Manaure salt flats to watch the artisanal harvest, and on to Uribia for the first night. Day two: the four-by-four north into the Alta Guajira to Punta Gallinas, lunch at the Bahía Honda and Bahía Hondita, the afternoon on the Taroa dunes, walking or boarding down the sand into the sea, the lighthouse at the northernmost point, and dinner and the night in hammocks at a Wayuu ranchería. Day three: the long way back down to the coast, the beach at Mayapo for a traditional lunch and a swim, and the drive to your hotel in Santa Marta. The program is private, with an English-speaking guide, hotel pickup and drop-off, three breakfasts, three lunches, two dinners, the two nights in hammocks at the rancherías and all-risk insurance, from 1,146 US dollars per person for two travelers; it is rated easy, because the walking is short and the effort is the heat, the wind and the hours in the vehicle. It is, in our tour page’s own words, an authentic desert experience and not a hotel stay, and the people who love it are the ones who read that sentence before they booked.
When to go: the weather by IDEAM’s numbers
The Alta Guajira is one of the driest places in Colombia. The table is IDEAM’s 1991 to 2020 normal for its Puerto Bolívar station, at 10 meters on the northern coast of the peninsula near Cabo de la Vela, in millimeters of rain per month, the average number of days with rain, and the average daily high and low in degrees; the year adds up to 325 millimeters on 27 days.
| Month | Rain | Days | High | Low |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 5 | 1 | 31.7 | 24.6 |
| February | 1 | 0 | 32.1 | 24.4 |
| March | 3 | 0 | 32.4 | 24.8 |
| April | 5 | 1 | 33.2 | 25.6 |
| May | 28 | 2 | 33.9 | 26.3 |
| June | 9 | 1 | 34.5 | 26.7 |
| July | 10 | 1 | 34.5 | 26.5 |
| August | 21 | 2 | 34.8 | 26.9 |
| September | 57 | 5 | 34.2 | 26.8 |
| October | 98 | 7 | 33.2 | 26.1 |
| November | 62 | 5 | 32.3 | 25.8 |
| December | 26 | 2 | 32.0 | 25.3 |
Read it as one long dry season with a wet interruption. From December to August the desert gets almost nothing, a few millimeters a month, and the track is at its most reliable; May brings a small shower season that rarely changes anything. September to November is the rain, such as it is, and October is the one month that can turn the flats to mud and the track into a different route, which is when the four-by-four and the driver who knows the way earn their money. The heat is the same all year and it is the real weather: highs of 32 in January and 35 in August, lows that never drop below 24, and a sun that the wind disguises until the evening, when you discover what it did to your skin. Riohacha, down the coast to the south, is wetter, 665 millimeters a year on 45 days at the airport, with the same two rainy windows in May and October. The wind is constant and it hides the sun; a scarf for your face on the track is not an affectation.
Sleeping on a ranchería: water, light, cash and what to pack
The nights are in chinchorros, the wide woven hammocks the Wayuu sleep in, hung under an open enramada of yotojoro, the dried cactus wood, with the wind coming through and the stars doing the rest. There is a bucket or a barrel for washing, a latrine or a simple toilet, a generator that may run for two or three hours after dark, and no signal on your phone from Uribia on. Water is the currency of the desert: the rancherías collect it or buy it by the tank, so you drink the bottled water we bring and you do not waste theirs. Cash matters, in small notes, because there are no card machines, no cash machines and no banks north of Uribia, and because the mochila you buy from the woman who wove it, the fish dinner and the passage at the ropes are all paid by hand. Our tour page’s list is right: comfortable waterproof footwear, repellent, high-factor sunscreen, light and pale quick-drying clothes, a long-sleeved shirt and a refillable bottle. We add: a scarf or buff for the wind and the dust, sunglasses, a hat that ties on, a light sleeping sheet or sarong for the hammock, a headlamp, a power bank, a dry bag, sandals for the beach and the dunes, and a small bag of things to give at the ropes that are not sweets.
Is La Guajira safe?
For the trip we run, yes, and the risks are the desert’s, not people’s. The British Foreign Office’s Colombia advice, updated on September 3, 2026, advises against all but essential travel within five kilometers of the border with Venezuela; the border in La Guajira is at Paraguachón, east of Maicao, and nothing on our route, Riohacha, Manaure, Uribia, Punta Gallinas, Mayapo, comes anywhere near it. The United States’ advisory, at Level 3 for the whole country, does not name La Guajira. What actually goes wrong here is a vehicle stuck in the sand or the mud with no signal, a driver who does not know whose land he is on, sunstroke, dehydration, a swim in a current at Taroa where the dunes drop into deep water, and a night trip nobody should make. The answer to all of it is the same: a local driver or guide who knows the land, a vehicle that belongs to someone who does this every week, water, the sun taken seriously, and no driving after dark. Riohacha and Uribia are ordinary Colombian towns with ordinary town care about the phone at night. The border towns and the smuggling routes toward Venezuela are not on any itinerary of ours and should not be on yours.
The rules of the people whose land it is
You are a guest in a territory that is titled to its owners, and the etiquette is simple. Ask before you photograph a person, a house or a cemetery, and accept the no; the Wayuu cemeteries are the most sacred places in the landscape, and Jepira, the cape itself, is one of them. Buy the mochilas, the chinchorros and the bracelets from the weaver, not from a middleman in Riohacha, and do not bargain the way you would in a market, because a mochila is weeks of one woman’s work. Do not bring alcohol into a ranchería that does not sell it. Pay for what you use, the hammock, the shower water, the passage, without argument. And when the guide says the track goes around a settlement rather than through it, or that a beach belongs to a family who would rather you did not swim there, that is not tourism theater; that is the law of the desert, applied for centuries by the palabrero and recognized by UNESCO, and the reason the Wayuu are still here.
What we do differently, and what we cannot promise
We run the Guajira from Santa Marta, privately, with an English-speaking guide, a driver for the Alta Guajira who knows the track and the families along it, the water we carry, the nights paid directly to the rancherías, and all-risk insurance, and we tell you about the hammocks, the buckets and the ropes before you pay. What we cannot promise is the number of flamingos, a dry track in October, a phone signal, or a shower with a tap; what we can promise is that you will not be left to find the way north with a driver from the town square, and that the nights and the food are paid to the rancherías themselves.
Questions travelers ask
How do you get to Cabo de la Vela and Punta Gallinas?
By road from Santa Marta or Riohacha to Uribia, and from Uribia by four-by-four on desert tracks, or by boat for Punta Gallinas; there is no public transport worth relying on north of Uribia, and you go with a local driver or guide who knows the track.
How many days do you need for La Guajira?
Three from Santa Marta, with two nights in the desert, is the minimum that reaches Punta Gallinas; a fourth day adds a night at Cabo de la Vela; the Macuira needs a week.
What is the best time to visit La Guajira?
December to August, the long dry season by IDEAM’s numbers, when the track is reliable; October is the wet month and the one to avoid if you can. It is hot every month, 32 to 35 degrees.
Where do you sleep in La Guajira?
In chinchorros, Wayuu hammocks, under open shelters on rancherías, with bucket showers, a few hours of generator light and no phone signal; our program includes two such nights.
Can you see flamingos in La Guajira?
Yes, at the Los Flamencos sanctuary at Camarones near Riohacha, free to enter, open 7 to 4, only with a local guide, by canoe across the lagoon; the birds are there all year in numbers that vary.
Is La Guajira safe for tourists?
On the route we run, yes: no advisory names it, and the dangers are the sun, the sand and a driver who does not know the land. Stay away from the Venezuelan border and do not drive the desert at night.
Why do children stop cars in La Guajira?
Because water and food are scarce on the rancherías, a situation the Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional in 2017. They hold a rope across the track and ask; we carry water and something useful to give.
Plan it with us
Write to us on WhatsApp with your dates and we will tell you what the track is doing and how the days fit with the coast, or start with our La Guajira tours page.
Sources
The facts on this page were checked on September 11, 2026 against the following sources: the DANE’s 2018 census results for the Wayuu people and its census profile of Uribia; the Procuraduría’s characterization of the Wayuu people; UNESCO on the Wayuu normative system and the palabrero; the Ministry of Transport on Sentencia T-302 de 2017; Parques Nacionales, SFF Los Flamencos and PNN Macuira; IDEAM’s climatological normals on datos.gov.co, Puerto Bolívar and Riohacha airport stations; the British Foreign Office’s Colombia travel advice; and the United States’ Colombia travel advisory. Our own programs’ inclusions and prices are those on our tour pages on the same date. Where a statement is our experience rather than an authority’s, the text says so.
