El Cocuy

Declared in 1977, it protects the greatest concentration of snow peaks in the Eastern Cordillera of the Colombian Andes, with more than twenty summits above 5,000 metres. The range is the ancestral and sacred territory of the indigenous U'wa people, who in the 1990s publicly threatened collective suicide if oil exploration were authorised on their land, an episode that drew international attention and helped halt extractive projects in the area. The park was closed to tourism between 2016 and 2018 after a dispute over territorial access between the U'wa community and the park authorities, reopening later under a joint management arrangement.