Providencia, Colombia: The Island Time Forgot

I have a thousand videos from this trip. A thousand. And not one of them does justice to how beautiful Providencia actually is. I keep telling people it felt like landing inside an episode of Lost — they laugh, and then I show them the footage of the plane coming in low over the water, and they stop laughing.

How to get to Providencia (the arrival that ruins you for every other arrival)

First, the logistics, because they shape the whole trip: you cannot fly directly to Providencia from mainland Colombia. You first fly into San Andrés — the bigger sister island — on a normal jet from Bogotá, Medellín, or Cartagena. And then, from San Andrés, you board something that looks less like a commercial flight and more like a toy.

The airline you book this leg with is Satena, the state-owned national carrier (some flights are physically operated by a small charter company), flying tiny propeller planes — most seat somewhere from under 10 up to about 19 people. The hop takes about twenty minutes, from San Andrés to Providencia's wonderfully named El Embrujo airport ("The Enchantment," which, honestly, fair).

I will never forget the approach. The plane drops low over the famous seven-coloured sea — turquoise lagoons and coral reefs sliding past the window before you've even touched down — toward a thin strip of runway perched right at the water's edge. For a few seconds it genuinely looks like you'll land in the sea instead of on tarmac. Then the wheels touch, smooth as anything, and the whole little cabin exhales. I've taken a lot of flights in a lot of places, and that one I'll never forget.

Real talk for your trip: book the San Andrés–Providencia flight as early as you can. Only a few daily departures on small aircraft, seats genuinely limited — especially in the drier high season. There's also a catamaran a few times a week (≈3.5 hours over open Caribbean), but I flew, and I'd fly again. One more thing: you pay a tourist card / tourist tax to enter the archipelago — budget for it.

How big is Providencia? Small enough to circle in under an hour

Let that sink in: you can drive a full lap of Providencia in well under an hour — the coastal ring road is only about 17 km, so a relaxed loop in a golf buggy is roughly 40 minutes to an hour. The island itself is around 17 square kilometres, and together with tiny Santa Catalina (linked by a painted footbridge) it holds roughly 5,000 people. No resort chains, no tour buses, no cruise crowds. You rent a buggy, circle the island, and the same faces start to wave at you.

The people are Raizal — islanders descended from English settlers and Africans, and they truly own this land, in every sense. You'll hear three languages braided together: an English-based Creole, English, and Spanish. Picture it: I'm in a Spanish-speaking country, and suddenly everyone around me is speaking something that sounds almost like English — except I can't understand a word of it. It's a different world from Bogotá, salt-aired and reggae-soaked, and that distance is exactly the point.

Diving with nurse sharks on Colombia's biggest reef

We took a boat out to the shark dive site — and let me reassure you right away: it's a spot you go to on purpose, by boat, to scuba dive, not somewhere sharks turn up next to your beach towel. So you can lie on the sand all day without picturing a fin sliding past you. Providencia sits on something world-class for diving: the reef is part of an enormous Caribbean coral system protected within the Old Providence McBean Lagoon National Natural Park, which itself sits inside the wider Seaflower Biosphere Reserve — declared by UNESCO in 2000. This is the second-largest barrier reef in the Caribbean (after Belize), one of the largest in the world.

And then there were the nurse sharks — the gentle ones, cruising the bottom, completely uninterested in you. We dropped down to them in scuba gear, and they were so sweet. Unbothered, elegant, moving through the water like they owned the place — which, like the islanders, they do.

At some point our guide reached over, took my GoPro right out of my hand, and filmed himself feeding the sharks — totally relaxed, like they were neighbourhood dogs — while I lost my entire mind in the best way. The footage is some of the best I've ever captured, and I didn't even shoot it. Surreal. I felt like I'd wandered onto a film set.

If you go: these dives are run by local operators — and that's a feature. The guides grew up on this reef; they know exactly where the calm nurse sharks are on any given day, the way you'd know which café has the good coffee. Book through your guesthouse or a local dive shop once you're there.

The best things to do in Providencia

• Cayo Cangrejo (Crab Cay) — a postcard islet inside the national park, ringed by superb snorkeling. The photo that makes friends text "wait, where IS this?"
• The McBean Lagoon mangroves — you can kayak narrow channels into hidden, glass-still lagoons. (I only found this out afterwards and could have kicked myself — don't make my mistake.) Pure silence, pure green.
• El Pico — hike the island's highest peak for a view over the whole reef in its impossible blues.
• Santa Catalina & the bridge — cross the painted Lovers' Bridge to the smaller island and find Morgan's Head, named for the pirate Henry Morgan. Yes, real pirate history.

Aim for the drier months — roughly mid-January to April, with March the driest; the rest of the year (about May to mid-January) is the rainy season, peaking in October. And come knowing the island took a brutal hit a few years back — Hurricane Iota, a Category 5, in November 2020 — and has been steadily rebuilding ever since. On an island of 5,000 people, choosing local guesthouses and local guides is the kind of travel that actually counts.

Why Providencia should be your next trip

Here's what I'd tell you over a coffee, leaning in: there are still plenty of little islands out there the world hasn't gotten to yet — and Providencia is one of the best of them. A genuinely small, genuinely local island sitting on a UNESCO-protected, world-scale reef, that has somehow stayed off the mass-tourism conveyor belt. The journey is part of the magic: you have to want it, connect through San Andrés, squeeze onto a tiny plane, and drop in low over that seven-coloured sea. That little bit of effort is exactly what's kept it the way it is.

You drive the whole island in under an hour. You scuba dive with sharks so gentle a local will feed them right next to you. You hear three languages in a single greeting. You watch the sea turn seven colours. And then you go home with a thousand videos nobody quite believes are real. I felt like I was living inside a story the entire time I was there — go write your own chapter before more people find it.

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