Colombia: What Can You See? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ben Nevis

Pico Cristóbal Colón is Colombia's highest peak at 5,700 metres. Even though the country is home to the Andes, Pico Cristóbal Colón isn't part of that mountain range: it's in the Caribbean plain. It has a permanent snowcap, and is named after Christopher Columbus.

Ben Nevis is not in Colombia. It's the highest mountain in Scotland.

Answer: Central

Bogotá is the largest city in Colombia and is in the centre of the country. It sits on a plateau called Bogotá savanna. The city's airport is named after the mythical El Dorado, a tribal chief or city that was ritually covered in gold. Since the 16th century, explorers of the region have tried to find the hidden gold.

Answer: Tequendama Falls

The Bogotá River flows northeast to southwest and, 32 kilometres southeast of Bogotá, reaches the Tequendama Falls. The waterfall is 132m high. In comparison, Angel Falls in Venezuela is 979 metres. That makes Angel Falls about seven times higher, but Tequendama Falls is still incredibly beautiful.

There is a building next to the waterfall that was built as a mansion in the 1920s. It then became a hotel, and is now a museum dedicated to ecology.

Answer: Caribbean Sea

1,760 kilometres of the coastline border the Caribbean Sea. The other 1,448 kilometres border the North Pacific Ocean. Cartagena is a city on the Caribbean coast. The old town is a Unesco World Heritage site and is full of old churches and cobbled streets.

Answer: A Roman Catholic church

Las Lajas Sanctuary is a basilica church in Ipiales, in western Colombia. It's built in a Guáitara River canyon in the Andes, and is connected to the other side by a bridge. It looks spectacular! The site claims to be the location of an apparition of the Virgin Mary to a mother and her daughter. A shrine was built to honour Mary, and a church was erected some years later.

Answer: La Guajira Desert

The La Guajira Desert is in the north of Colombia, close to the Caribbean Sea. The harsh landscape is the home of indigenous South Americans called the Wayuu people. Because of the harshness of the environment, this area of the country doesn't generate much tourism, but it is a good place for kitesurfing and stargazing.

Answer: Panama

The Colombian border with Panama is in the west of Colombia. The Pan-American Highway extends all the way from Alaska to Argentina and is over 30,000 kilometres long. There is, however, the Darién Gap. It is an area of swampland, marshland, and rainforest that will be expensive to build over, and not very environmentally friendly.

Answer: Coffee

Some of the main items that Colombia exports to the US are oil, coal, gold, flowers, tropical fruits, and coffee. The National Coffee Park (Parque Nacional del Café) is in central Colombia and features a range of roller coasters, food stalls, and museum exhibitions, all of which centre around coffee. As a coffee lover, this place is high on my list of things to see!

Answer: It was built in a mine.

Due to structural problems, the original church that was carved into an active mine was declared unsafe. A competition was held to design a new church, which now sits 60 metres under the old one. Within the new church, there are 14 small chapels that represent the stations of the cross, three naves, and a dome.

Some of the rooms are made of tunnels that already existed as part of the mine.

Answer: Columbia River

The Catatumbo River is in northern Colombia and flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. 'Catatumbo lightning', or 'Maracaibo Beacon', is a natural phenomenon over the marshlands at the mouth of the river. For 140 to 160 nights in a year, lightning storms occur for approximately 10 hours a night.

Columbia River is in North America, not South America.