Popayán

No written record survives of the Indigenous village that stood here before the Spanish, but the Morro del Tulcán, a truncated pyramid on the edge of the centre, shows the area was settled by a chiefdom society long before. Sebastián de Belalcázar arrived on 13 January 1537 and Popayán was then governed under the jurisdiction of the Royal Audiencia of Quito. Lying on the route between Lima, Quito and Cartagena, it became a transfer point for gold going north to Spain, and from 1760 it had a mint striking gold and silver coins.

Its landowning families grew rich, built the churches and mansions of the centre, and sent their sons to the University of Cauca, founded in 1827. Popayán gave the republic seventeen presidents, including Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, as well as the scientist Francisco José de Caldas and the poet Guillermo Valencia. Its cathedral long held the Crown of the Andes, a 16th-century crown set with emeralds, later sold to raise money for charitable purposes.

The city has been destroyed several times by earthquakes. The most recent, on the morning of Holy Thursday, 31 March 1983, lasted only eighteen seconds but killed 267 people and damaged 14,000 buildings, most of them in the historic centre. Rebuilding took more than a decade and led to Colombia's first seismic building code. The centre was restored in its white colonial form, though a few empty lots remain.

Holy Week defines Popayán. Processions have been recorded since 1558, and every night from Tuesday to Holy Saturday the pasos, platforms bearing old carved religious images, are carried through the centre on the shoulders of the cargueros along a route in the shape of a cross that takes in the main churches. Being chosen to carry a paso is a great honour. UNESCO inscribed the processions on its intangible heritage lists in 2009, and the week also brings a festival of religious music begun in the 1960s.

The city's reputation as the 'White City' and the 'University City' reflects a cultured, conservative identity built by its old families, its poets and its university, whose students give the centre much of its life during the year. In 2005 UNESCO named Popayán its first City of Gastronomy, recognising cooking traditions passed down orally for generations.

Popular culture has its own roots. The chirimía, a band of cane flutes and drums, plays at Christmas and other celebrations, and farmers on the plateau play string music. In early January the Carnavales de Pubenza, historically linked to the Blacks and Whites celebrations of south-western Colombia, fill the city for a week. The Misak, or Guambiano, people of the highlands around Silvia, recognisable by their distinctive blue dress, make many of the crafts sold in the city.

The national statistics office projected the municipality's population at about 346,000 for 2025. Popayán is the administrative capital of Cauca and a university city, and the countryside around it grows coffee and food crops.

Daily life is quieter and earlier than in Cali. The historic centre fills with office workers, students and shoppers by day and empties after dark, while most residents live in newer districts outside the colonial core, and shop in the malls and the markets. The 1983 earthquake still shapes the centre: rebuilding took more than ten years, the disaster led to laws requiring earthquake-resistant building, and a few lots in the old streets have never been rebuilt.

Cauca's conflict is never far away. The department is one of the parts of Colombia most affected by armed groups, and protests and road blockades on the Pan-American Highway, the city's link to Cali and to Pasto, are a recurring part of life, as are Indigenous movements organised through their own councils.

Popayán's cooking blends Spanish and Indigenous traditions, and the city is proud of it. Its signature is pipián, a stew of potato and peanut, which fills empanadas de pipián, small fried pastries served with a peanut chilli sauce, and tamales de pipián. Carantanta, crisp fragments of maize dough scraped from the pot, is eaten as a snack or in soup, and the city's soups include sancocho and sango. Ullucos, an Andean tuber, appear as a vegetable.

Breads and sweets are a large part of the tradition: rosquillas, molletes and cucas from the bakeries, and at Christmas a table of hojaldras, manjar blanco, a sweet cream of milk, sugar and rice, dulce cortado and figs in syrup. Helado de paila, ice cream made in a large, shallow copper pan, is a classic, and champús is a drink of maize, panela, lulo, pineapple and spices.

Aguardiente caucano is the anise spirit of Cauca, and toley water is a local drink. Each September the National Gastronomy Congress brings cooks to the city, and the market near Plaza Bolívar is the place for cheap, everyday regional food.