The last black steam train departed Apulo on a Sunday in 1978, pulling away from a crowded platform of waving hands and tearful spectators. With its departure, the town lost more than a railway connection to Bogotá. It lost the pulse that had once tied this sweltering outpost in the Tequendama valley to Colombia’s capital. Though only 90 kilometers separate the two communities, the retreat of the “Iron Rooster” left Apulo suspended in time, a town stranded between memory and reinvention.
Today, the journey from Bogotá unfolds along the winding Mosquera–Girardot highway, where the Andes gradually loosen their grip and the air grows heavier with heat. In barely two hours, the cool drizzle of the high plateau gives way to the dry furnace of the Magdalena basin. Apulo, now home to some 16,000 residents, appears suddenly among dusty hillsides and tangled vegetation, its streets shimmering beneath a relentless tropical sun.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the railway transformed Apulo into one of central Colombia’s favored warm-weather retreats. The steam locomotive carried Bogotá’s elites — men in fedoras and women in flowing linen dresses — away from the cold capital toward rivers, waterfalls, and languid afternoons beneath mango trees. The train itself moved slowly, hissing and rattling through the mountains with stubborn determination, yet for generations it represented modernity, escape, and connection.
Just beyond a rugged ridge lies Anapoima, Apulo’s better-known sister town, long celebrated for what a television documentary once proclaimed the “second best climate in the world.” But locals insist Apulo is hotter still. Here the heat is not gentle but elemental — dry, oppressive, and all-consuming. It settles onto rooftops and skin alike, dictating the rhythm of daily life. People move slowly in the afternoons, gathering beneath awnings and trees, while stray dogs sprawl motionless in pockets of shade.
The town’s main street feels cinematic, like a forgotten set from a spaghetti Western abandoned beneath the tropical sun. A broad dirt avenue cuts through the center, lined with weatherworn storefronts whose peeling paint curls away from cracked walls. Rusted iron balconies sag above roadside restaurants serving thick cuts of pork rind wrapped in newspaper to travelers stopping in SUVs on their way farther south. Between tufts of wild grass, fragments of the old railway tracks still emerge from the earth — ghostly reminders of an era when steam engines once thundered through town.
At the heart of Apulo stands its Republican-era town hall, painted in fading yellow and white. The building once served as one of Colombia’s grandest hotels, welcoming honeymooners, politicians, and wealthy families escaping Bogotá’s cold rains. Even now, its broad façade preserves traces of vanished elegance. But the prosperity that sustained the town slowly evaporated. A nearby cement factory relocated its operations decades ago, taking jobs and stability with it, while tourism gradually shifted behind the walls of private condominiums built into the surrounding hillsides.
A short drive separates two strikingly different versions of Apulo. On one side are gated communities hidden behind walls as tall as trees, guarded day and night by private security. Inside, modern bungalows surround tiled swimming pools and tennis courts shaded by palms. On Friday afternoons, executives from Bogotá arrive in polished SUVs, trading office shoes for sandals and linen shirts. Children ride in golf carts while parents retreat beneath air-conditioning humming against the heat.
Down by the river – Río Apulo – another Apulo unfolds. Some homes stand behind concrete walls, others beneath corrugated tin roofs balanced precariously on wooden beams. Dust from passing cars filters through open windows and settles across furniture. Young girls wander the streets in oversized high heels borrowed from their mothers, while boys cradle baby chicks in their hands and watch traffic pass from shaded doorways. Families gather outdoors in folding chairs, squinting against the white glare of the afternoon sun.
Each weekend, these parallel worlds intersect. Women from the riverside neighborhoods pass through the condominium gates in uniforms to prepare ajiaco, sweep patios, and skim leaves from swimming pools. On Sunday evenings, as the visitors depart for Bogotá and the mountain road climbs back toward cooler air, workers wave goodbye and wait for the next caravan of weekend arrivals.
As dusk settles over Apulo, the town softens. Residents drift toward the central square to catch the evening breeze, gathering beneath old-fashioned lampposts as beer bottles clink across plastic tables. Couples lean together in the fading heat while motorcycles rumble slowly past. In the darkness, the potholes, graffiti, and crumbling façades recede from view, allowing the imagination to reconstruct the town as it once was — a glamorous retreat animated by music, polished automobiles, and the arrival of the evening train.
The luxury condominiums now serve the role once occupied by the grand hotel, yet visitors still come searching for the same landscape: the dry heat, the riverside calm, the clouds of mint-green butterflies that drift through the valley at sunset. In Apulo, movement never truly stops. Cars continue arriving from Bogotá every weekend. Only the train remains absent — its station swallowed by vines, its rails rusting quietly beneath the grass, like a memory slowly disappearing into the tropical earth.
