---
type: Place
title: Playa Brava
description: The quiet beach inside Tayrona — a three-hour walk in, no phone signal, an $8 hammock to sleep in, and water you are not allowed to swim in, which is why it stays empty.
tags: [colombia, tayrona, playa-brava, beach, hiking, camping, hammocks, off-grid]
coordinates: {lat: 11.2998, lng: -74.1886}
timestamp: 2026-08-07T12:10:00Z
---

# Playa Brava

A beach inside [Tayrona National Park](/places/tayrona-national-park.md) on
[Colombia](/countries/colombia.md)'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](/places/cabo-san-juan.md), 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](/tips/ride-out-past-the-tourist-strip.md).
- **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](/tips/ask-travellers-coming-the-other-way.md).
- **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 🇨🇴](/videos/vy2ZMxjBMKc.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy2ZMxjBMKc
- [Hiking to a Nudist Beach in Colombia 🇨🇴](/videos/W3IZFKlxjFs.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3IZFKlxjFs — the walk out, and the beach he
  didn't sleep at