Playa Brava

A beach inside Tayrona National Park on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, reachable only on foot. Harry hikes in, sleeps in a hammock on the sand, and calls it the best experience he has had in Colombia.

The reason it is quiet is that you cannot swim there. A red flag flies over the beach; the current is too strong and the waves too big. Harry looks at the waves, says privately he doesn’t think they’re that big, and obeys the flag anyway. Two people are on the beach when he arrives.

Its busy counterpart is Cabo San Juan, the park’s most popular beach, where you can swim. A traveller who had done a night at each told him Playa Brava was better, and gave the figure that decided it: over a hundred people sharing four toilets at the other one (from video – unverified).

Getting there

• A three- to four-hour hike, described as moderate rather than hard — steep in sections, up over a ridge and back down, well signposted, with a few shops and farms on the way. Harry warns the descent is worse on the knees than the climb.
• Entry to the park: 70,000 pesos, about £15 or $18 (from video – unverified).
• Two entrances, and the choice matters. Harry uses the Calabazo entrance because it is quieter; the main entrance is far busier. Calabazo is the longer walk, which is exactly why it filters. (He names the other entrance on camera but the subtitles garble it beyond recovery, so it is not recorded here.)
• What you are meant to bring: a passport and a yellow-fever vaccination certificate. In practice neither was enforced — one person in a group of four showed ID and nobody was asked for a vaccine record, and Harry states plainly that he hadn’t had the vaccination yet. Recorded as what happened, not as advice about what will happen.
• Motor-taxis cover part of the route if you don’t want to walk all of it.
• Horses can be hired: 80,000 pesos each way (from video – unverified).
• Leave your main bag at your hostel. Harry checked out and left his behind, carrying only what he needed for the night.

On the trail

• An indigenous village on the route offers a short tour for 10,000 pesos a head, about $2–2.50 (from video – unverified). Filming is permitted but not for social media, so nothing from it appears in the video. Harry says he filmed nothing and the bundle records no more than that.
• Fresh coconuts are sold along the way — large, and full of water.
• Fresh juice at a farm, which Harry takes for lemonade and turns out to be orange, sweetened naturally. A working farm with ducks, chickens and dogs.
• A viewpoint about ten minutes off the track, steep, which a family living on the route told them about. It looks back over the park and out to the beaches, and someone was camping on it.
• Wildlife: monkeys and toucans are on the trail, and the advice he is given is that you have to be out very early to see them. He hears mostly birds.
• Leafcutter ants working a column across and under the path, which he stops to watch.

Sleeping there

One camp, with a restaurant and bathrooms, a pool, a volleyball court and a fire in the evening.

• A tent is the cheapest option; Harry expects it would be hot.
• A hammock is what he takes — $8 per the video description. There are two kinds and staff steer him to the more enclosed one, because it gets cold at night.
• Private cabins: $50 US (from video – unverified) — the same as he had been paying elsewhere, and he says he chose the hammock deliberately, to have done it, and because viewers considering it would want to know.
• He slept well. Woke four or five times to the waves, never uncomfortable, never struggled to drop off again, and he would do it again.
• No mobile signal at all, which he calls a forced detox. There is wi-fi for about an hour in the evening.

Nearby

A waterfall about ten minutes’ walk from the camp, 10–20 metres high (from video – unverified), falling into a clear freshwater pool you can stand under. Cold, not deep, and — after three or four hours of walking — the thing he recommends most on the page.

Harry’s tips

• Take the longer entrance. The extra distance is what buys the quiet.
• Go to the beach you can’t swim at. The restriction is doing the work of keeping it empty — see ride out past the tourist strip.
• Ask people walking the other way. Everything he knew about which beach to pick came from travellers already coming out — see ask travellers coming the other way.
• Take the hammock over the cabin at least once, but take the enclosed kind; it gets genuinely cold.
• Don’t stand under the coconut palms. He moves, and jokes about the statistic.

Source videos

• Sleeping on the Beach In Colombia 🇨🇴 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy2ZMxjBMKc
• Hiking to a Nudist Beach in Colombia 🇨🇴 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3IZFKlxjFs — the walk out, and the beach he didn’t sleep at