Bogota

Bogota sits at 2,640 metres above sea level — higher than any European capital, higher than Denver, higher than most places where eight million people have any business trying to breathe. That altitude is not trivia. It is the central fact of the city's economy, its history, and its surprising emergence as Latin America's fastest-growing tech hub.

The Muisca people settled this Andean plateau long before the Spanish arrived in 1538, drawn by the same advantage that still defines Bogota: a cool, temperate climate in the tropics, fertile highland soil, and a natural fortress of mountains that made the Sabana de Bogota one of the most defensible positions in South America. The Spanish built their colonial administration here because controlling this plateau meant controlling the highlands that separated the Caribbean coast from the Pacific. That administrative function never left — Bogota remains Colombia's capital, and the gravitational pull of government, universities, and legal infrastructure concentrated talent here over centuries.

The Wikipedia entry mentions that Bogota is Colombia's capital and largest city. What it undersells is the speed and scale of its technology transformation. Bogota hosts 62% of Colombia's tech companies and 791 startups. The ecosystem grew 18.4% in a single year, ranking 62nd globally. Colombia's IT outsourcing revenue is projected to exceed $803 million in 2025, with total IT industry value expected to reach $2.87 billion by 2030 — and 89% of all capital raised by Colombian startups in the last year came from Bogota-based companies. Google, Dell, HP, Uber, and Meta all maintain offices here. The city produces over 60,000 skilled developers, fed by institutions like the National University of Colombia and the University of the Andes.

This is altitude advantage applied to knowledge work. While coastal cities compete on port access and manufacturing wages, Bogota competes on educated labour, time-zone alignment with the US, and cost arbitrage — a senior developer here costs a fraction of a Silicon Valley equivalent. The biological parallel is altitudinal zonation: different elevations support different economic ecosystems, and Bogota has found a niche that lowland competitors cannot easily replicate. Its 2,640-metre perch, once a disadvantage for shipping goods, becomes irrelevant when the product is code.