World’s Most Beautiful River

Caño Cristales, a river in Columbia’s Sierra de la Macarena, is as moody as it is beautiful. Come a bit too early in the dry season, and you’ll just find a parched river bed. Come a bit too late in the wet season, and everything will be flooded and more inaccessible than unusual. But come just at the right time, in the first few days of the wet season, and you’ll witness a magnificent spectacle of rainbow colors in a river that’s nicknamed the “most beautiful river in the world”.

Caño Cristales’ waters flow from the plateau south of the Sierranía de la Macarena, a national park and mountain range that is a sanctuary for many animal and plant species. The rugged terrain is coupled up with many archaeological sites and caves that have not been explored. The archaeological sites have pictograms and petroglyphs that date as far back as the pre-Columbian times. The river is the parks central feature. The 100 km long and 20 m wide river is the national park’s central feature.

The river bed and river rocks are covered with green and brown mosses and algae during most of the year. At the onset of the wet season in early October and early April, however, they receive enough moisture and sunlight to unfold a most spectacular array of colors ranging from deep red, yellow and pink to blue, green and black.

However, as the wet season progresses, it is not possible to view that many colours. As the wet season progresses, the water levels become deeper and the river currents faster, obscuring the bottom of the river and therefore not letting the much needed sunlight through for the river’s many mosses and algae.