Minca, a small town located in the mountains near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, was one of those gorgeous places I couldn’t wait to leave. Perhaps Minca’s lush jungle scenery and green mountain vistas were just too beautiful, because the town is now infested with fancy-pants European backpackers and the accompanying vegan restaurants and yoga studios. And you can’t even find a decent hiking trail to escape them.
It’s a shame, because I was excited to go to Minca. Every travel blog and guide described it as the ultimate, laid-back, epic, adventurous, search engine optimized luxury budget backpacker paradise. I at least thought I might be able to do some bird watching or something.
Which I sort of did, I guess. And we did see an epic rainbow. But overall, Minca was a disappointment. I wouldn’t go back there and I wouldn’t recommend you waste your time there either. Unless you like bug bites.
The Uphill Journey to Minca and Our Hostel
Minca is a small town located near the city of Santa Marta, on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The town is, in fact, only 15 kilometers from the city. You can take a bus to Santa Marta and find a relatively cheap taxi up the hill to Minca. Or take the local bus, which seems to mostly serve tourists and one or two bemused locals.
The bus drops off in the center of town, in front of a gluten free bakery or something. The center of town is small, little more than a handful of muddy roads. The one thing it has going for it is that it’s an easy place to find a decent cup of coffee.
We stayed at a little hostel called Hostal Alto de la Montaña, which was nice enough. I had no problems with it. If you ignore my advice and decide to see Minca for yourself, you can click this link and I’ll get a small commission at no extra cost to you.
The absolute best thing about Hostal Alto de La Montaña is the amazing common area they have overlooking the surrounding misty green mountains. The second best thing is that they have a private trail that leads down to a really gorgeous little jungle stream.
Unfortunately, Hostal Alto de la Montaña also lives up to its name. It’s located about a 30-minute walk uphill from the town center. A steep walk uphill. We probably could have found a taxi or something, but we chose to walk. As we lugged our bags up the winding road, the weather gods decided to punish us for coming to Minca and began to pour sheets of rain. We arrived soaking wet.
The So-Called Hiking
I’d read that Minca was full of trekking and gorgeous nature. That’s why we came in the first place. While there is a lot of gorgeous nature, for whatever reason we absolutely could not figure out the trekking. Unless you count walking up the hill along the road to our hostel.
After we dried off from the rain, we ironically wanted to get wet again and went to find Pozo Azul. Pozo Azul is a little pool with a waterfall where you can swim in the jungle and is often listed as one of the best things to do in Minca. It was crowded, but nice enough.
Pozo Azul is about an hour’s walk from the center of town, which sounds great, except that nearly the entire hour is spent on the narrow shoulder of a winding mountain road. Eventually you find another “trail” that spends about ten minutes in the jungle to the waterfall.
We also tried going to another set of waterfalls later. The name started with an “M” and maybe it was the Marinka waterfalls, but it might have been something else entirely. We gave up on that one, too. Once again, the so called “hiking” to the falls seemed like nothing more than walking along the side of the road.
The roads around Minca were also surprisingly busy for how small of a town it is. Motorcycles and heavy trucks zoomed past every few minutes. The trucks seemed especially intent on spouting noxious clouds of diesel exhaust directly into our faces. The roads are windy with lots of blind corners, and the shoulders so narrow that it felt like the trucks and motorcycles were missing us by mere inches. It was stressful.
Based on all of the ultimate epic travel guides to Minca I’d read, I was expecting at least a couple of trails through the surrounding jungle. I like to be out in the forest and appreciate nature. That’s very hard to do when you’re dodging motorcycles and inhaling exhaust fumes.
The So-Called Birdwatching
Minca is also known for its birdwatching. I imagine that there are probably hundreds of fascinating species of birds living in the surrounding forest. I’d started getting into birdwatching on our trip, especially after seeing a quetzal in Guatemala. I though Minca would be the place to do it.
We saw one unlucky traveler attempting a birdwatching tour on the side of the highway. I felt bad for both him and his poor guide. They kept having to move their spotting scope to avoid traffic. Considering all the cars and the noise, I have no idea how they managed to see anything.
We did manage, however, to see a toucan in the treetops while staring out from the balcony of our hostel. That was cool.
We also saw a pair of peacocks along the road. That seemed cool, until I remembered that peacocks are originally from India and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl are not at all native to either Colombia, South America or even the Western Hemisphere. Those poor birds probably escaped into the jungle from some fancy hotel or some rich asshole’s luxury vacation home.
Minca Is Full of Biting Bugs
I almost forgot to mention this part in my long list of grievances against the town of Minca: Minca is full of bugs.
My wife woke up one day with a series of red marks on the backs of her legs. Of course, our immediate thought was “bed bugs!” We’d met other people who’d gotten bed bugs on their trips and while they might not be the worst thing that could happen on a trip, they definitely weren’t something either of us were prepared to deal with.
Thankfully, before we bought delousing powder and burned all of our clothes, we noticed that seemingly every other tourist in town had the same red marks on their legs. Some people had it much worse. Could this be a town-wide bed bug infestation?
After a little bit of googling, we found out that Minca has a problem not with bed bugs, but with tiny biting flies. They sometimes call them “sandflies” or “noseeums.” But they are tiny, nearly invisible, bugs that hang out around rivers and other water sources. You don’t feel them biting, but wake up the next day with your legs covered in itchy red bumps.
All the shops in town sell bug spray. And the bugs are harmless, just annoying. However, the experience didn’t exactly help make our experience in Minca more enjoyable.
Is Minca Worth Visiting? No. It is Not.
In the end, I left Minca with a profound sense of disappointment. It’s the kind of place that reminded me of some of the worst parts of Costa Rica. Every business in town was geared exclusively for tourists. Relatively affluent, and dare I say basic, tourists at that.
Even Minca’s Wikipedia page reads like a tourist brochure. (For some reason, the Wikipedia page is only in Spanish, which is odd considering we probably heard more English in Minca than anywhere else in Colombia outside of El Poblado.) The whole town feels like it exists only for the whims of visiting gringos. There’s nothing there that has anything to do with Colombia. Let alone the indigenous people who call the region home.
And at the very least, Costa Rica’s overly gentrified tourist towns tend to have one or two actual hiking trails, not just the narrow shoulders of busy roads.
Actually, Minca is probably more like the two peacocks we saw than anything else. Pretty to look at, but definitely not Colombian. At best, an out of place and rather bewildered visitor. At worst, an invasive species that might potentially damage the local ecosystem.
Either way, I will not be going back to Minca. I don’t suggest you go there, either. Colombia has plenty of other wonderful places to travel that are equally beautiful and much more authentic.
You can read more about Colombia’s many beautiful travel destinations here: Covering Ground in Colombia: A Travel Guide to One of the World’s Most Magical Countries
