Colombia is best for coffee and emeralds, but the country also has significant surface gold deposits that enabled ancient residents of the area to craft exquisite gold artifacts. Bogota's Museo Del Oro now houses many of those finds from the pre-Colombian era and is widely viewed as the best of its kind in the world as well as one of Bogota’s top attractions.

One comment I’ll make is that I’ve found many museums in many developing countries to be rather poorly curated with much of their collections displayed in a random warehouse like manner . Colombia, like Mexico, is a major exception to this generalization. In Colombia they do their museums really well!

Most people are familiar with the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, but we tend to forget significant civilizations in other parts and eras in pre-Columbian South America. We associate Peru and neighboring Andean regions with the Incas, but the fact is that the Incas emerged as a dominant empire less than two centuries before the Spanish conquest. Earlier civilizations built significant cities and left extensive artwork and artifacts.

I tend to think of other parts of South America as having had relatively primitive cultures like those of many tribes that still inhabit the Amazon Basin, like the until-recently headhunting Jivaros and Shuars. That’s apparently far from the case in many parts of what is now Colombia where different cultures existed regionally and were very advanced in metallurgy and ceramics. Some anthropologists believe the Tayrona tribes in the Caribbean region even had an understanding of astronomy comparable to that of the Mayans.

Anyway, Bogota’s Gold Museum is the biggest of its kind in the world. I particularly liked the way it was laid out with individual halls dedicated to the works of each of the different peoples of pre-Hispanic Colombia – the Muisca, Tayrona, Calima, Quimbaya, Zenu, Tolima, Tierradentro, San Agustin, and Uraba. Other parts detail the metallurgical processes used to produce the artefacts and top floor galleries display specific articles from multiple cultures that were used in religious ceremonies and by tribal shamans. On, and unusually for South America, the signage is all in English as well as Spanish!