Colombia

Colombia is the only South American country with a coast on two oceans and the point where the Andes split into three ranges separated by the Magdalena and Cauca valleys. That branching isolates valleys and slopes and multiplies the environments: páramo above cloud forest, Amazon rainforest to the southeast, flooded savannahs in the Orinoquía, dry forest in the Caribbean and, in the northwest, the Chocó, one of the rainiest regions on the planet. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta rises in isolation from the sea to almost five thousand eight hundred metres and works as an ecological island with species found nowhere else. That sum of barriers and microclimates makes it the country with the most bird and orchid species in the world.