page_title: Bogotá
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Bogotá / Geography
caption_attribution_description: Hailstorm bogota
context_page_description: Bogotá, officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá during the time of the colony and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital and largest city of Colombia, administered as the Capital District, as well as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca. Bogotá is a territorial entity of the first order, with the same administrative status as the departments of Colombia. It is the political, economic, administrative and industrial center of the country.
  Bogotá was founded as the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada on 6 August 1538, by Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada after a harsh expedition into the Andes conquering the Muisca. The Muisca were the indigenous inhabitants of the region, and they called the place of the foundation "Thybzaca" or "Old Town". The name of Bogotá corresponds to the Spanish pronunciation of the Chibcha Bacatá which was the name of a neighboring settlement located between the modern towns of Funza and Cota. There are different opinions about the meaning of the word Bacatá, the most accepted being that it means "walling of the farmland" in the Chibcha language.
context_section_description: Bogotá is located in the southeastern part of the Bogotá savanna (Sabana de Bogotá) at an average altitude of 2,640 metres (8,660 ft) above sea level. The Bogotá savanna is popularly called "savannah" (sabana), but constitutes actually a high plateau in the Andes mountains, part of an extended region known as the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, which literally means "high plateau of Cundinamarca and Boyacá". Bogotá is the largest city in the world at its elevation; there is no urban area that is both higher and more populous than Bogotá.
  In the extreme south of Bogota's District, the world's largest continuous paramo ecosystem can be found; Sumapaz Páramo in the locality Sumapaz.
  The Bogotá River running NE-SW crosses the sabana, forming Tequendama Falls (Salto del Tequendama) to the south. Tributary rivers form valleys with flourishing villages, whose economy is based on agriculture, livestock raising and artisanal production.
  The sabana is bordered to the east by the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range. The Eastern Hills, which limit city growth, run from south to north, and form east of the center the Guadalupe and Monserrate mountains. The western city limit is the Bogotá River. The Sumapaz Paramo (moorland) borders the south and to the north Bogotá extends over the plateau up to the towns of Chía and Sopó.
  Most of the wetlands in the Bogota region have disappeared. They covered nearly 50,000 hectares in the 1960s, compared to only 727 in 2019, for a disappearance rate of 98%.
caption: Hailstorm in Bogotá
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