Riding All 123 Municipalities of Boyacá

There are one hundred and twenty-three municipalities in the department of Boyacá. Between 20 June 2018 and 27 July 2019 we rode a bicycle into every single one of them — not as a record attempt, but because we wanted to understand this place at the only speed that tells the truth: the speed of a bike on a climb.

I should be clear about one thing from the start, because it is the part of this story that usually gets lost: the idea was not mine. The Reto 123 was Diego Supelano's project. He had been turning it over for a long time before it existed as anything more than a conversation, and one day he invited me in. I said yes without fully understanding what I was agreeing to, which is generally how the best things start.

Boyacá sits in the heart of Colombia's Eastern Cordillera, almost entirely folded into the Andes. It is the cradle of Colombian cycling — the soil that grew the climbers who now win the world's biggest races. But before it was a story we could tell visitors, it was a question we needed to answer for ourselves. What is actually out there, past the towns everyone knows? What do the roads feel like when you string them all together?

01 — The numberOne hundred and twenty-three

Anyone can ride the famous climbs. Far fewer have turned a pedal in all 123 municipalities — across 13 provinces, from the lake country in the east to the river towns dropping toward the Magdalena in the west. The number was Diego's frame, and it was a good one: a way to force us off the obvious routes and into the ones that don't exist on any tour map.

What we found was that Boyacá is not one landscape. It's a dozen of them, stacked vertically. You can begin a day at 2,500 metres among onion fields and end it on a paramo at over 3,400, where the air thins and the light goes silver. The bicycle is the only honest way to feel that transition in your legs and your lungs.

02 — The roadsRoads that aren't on any tour map

Some of the best riding either of us has ever done is on roads with no name and no fame. A ribbon of fresh tarmac climbing out of a valley nobody photographs. A gravel sector linking two villages that have been connected by foot and hoof for centuries. The variety is the point: smooth high-mountain passes for the road cyclist, packed-earth backroads for the all-road rider, and descents that reward you for everything the climb took.

Riding all 123 taught us to read this terrain — where the wind turns on the paramo before a storm, which descents hold gravel in the apex, where the day's real difficulty hides. That knowledge isn't in any guidebook. It's the difference between visiting Boyacá and being shown Boyacá.

Boyacá doesn't give you the view. It makes you earn it — and then it gives you everything.

03 — The altitudeWhy this is where climbers are made

There is a reason Colombia produces climbers the way other countries produce sprinters. Children here grow up training at altitudes that flatlanders only reach on a summer training camp. The gradients are long and relentless; the air gives you nothing for free. Ride these roads and you understand, in your own body, why a kid from a Boyacá village can float up a mountain that breaks European professionals.

For a visiting cyclist, that's not a warning — it's the draw. To ride where legends are made, against the same gravity, on the same roads, is a different kind of trophy than another sportive medal. You don't conquer these mountains. You're admitted to them.

04 — The peopleWhat waits at kilometre sixty

The geography would be enough. The people make it unforgettable. In 123 towns we were handed aguapanela by strangers, pointed toward shortcuts by farmers, and fed almojábanas still warm from a wood oven. There is a culture of warmth here — la cultura boyacense — that turns a hard day on the bike into something closer to a homecoming.

This is the layer most tours never reach: the cheese-maker in Paipa, the family restaurant at the foot of a climb, the village that remembers the national champion who was born on its main street. These are the kilometres between the climbs, and they are why people come back.

05 — The reasonFrom a personal quest to a way to share it

We closed the last municipality on 27 July 2019 — Duitama's birthday, which was not an accident. Thirteen months after the first one. By then we had built a map between us that no GPS could hold: the right road, the right season, the right place to stop. Keeping it to ourselves felt like a waste. Ride The Andes is what I built to give Boyacá back to the world the way it deserves: from the saddle, at altitude, earned kilometre by kilometre. Diego is not part of the company — the Reto was his, the tour is mine — but there is no honest version of this story that leaves him out of it.

Our flagship journey, The Boyacá Traverse, is the distilled best of those thirteen months on the road — the climbs worth the suffering, the towns worth the stop, sequenced so a rider arriving from sea level can meet this place properly. Ten riders at a time. One territory, ridden municipality by municipality — all 123 of them.