25 overlooked travel destinations in South America

From Bolivian ruins to Surinamese colonial cities, these 25 South American destinations reward travelers willing to look beyond the continent's most-visited landmarks

Credit: Leo Castro, Pexels

South America is one of the most geographically and culturally diverse regions on Earth, yet most international visitors follow a familiar circuit: Buenos Aires, the Inca Trail, the Amazon $AMZN, the Atacama, Rio de Janeiro. These are worthwhile destinations, but they represent a fraction of what the continent offers. Outside the well-worn routes lie cloud forest fortresses, colonial cities that haven't changed in centuries, glacial valleys framed by volcanoes, Amazonian islands the size of small countries, and wetlands teeming with wildlife that rivals anything in Africa.

The continent spans nearly 18 million square kilometers and 12 sovereign countries, plus French Guiana. It contains the world's largest rainforest, the longest mountain range, the driest desert, and some of the most complex pre-Columbian civilizations ever recorded. Yet travel coverage — and tourist infrastructure — clusters around a handful of flagship sites. The result is that extraordinary places go almost entirely unvisited by international travelers.

Part of this is practical. Getting to Guyana's interior savannahs or a small colonial town in the Colombian coffee region takes more planning than booking a flight to Cusco. Some destinations lack the marketing budgets of more established tourism economies. Others are obscured by proximity to a more famous neighbor — travelers pass through on their way somewhere else without stopping.

But the logistics are often simpler than they appear. South America has reliable domestic aviation networks, improving road infrastructure, and a well-established overland bus culture that connects cities and small towns across the continent. Budget and midrange accommodation is available almost everywhere. And the payoff — genuine encounters with local life, landscapes without crowds, and a sense of discovery — is proportionally greater than anything available at a better-known site.

This list draws from all corners of the continent: cities with centuries of history, protected wilderness areas with no permanent population, small towns that serve as bases for harder-to-reach landscapes. All of them are worth the detour.

Credit: Dpasten, Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0

Santa Cruz de Mompox sits on an island formed by a branch of the Magdalena River in northern Colombia's Bolívar department. The town was founded by the Spanish in 1537 and served as a key transit point for colonizers moving goods and people between the Caribbean coast and the interior. During the colonial period, it was wealthier and more strategically important than Cartagena. Then the main channel of the Magdalena shifted away over subsequent centuries, leaving the town effectively bypassed by commerce and modernity. The result is one of the best-preserved colonial streetscapes in Latin America.

UNESCO added Mompox to its World Heritage list in 1995, recognizing the integrity of its historic center. The streets are lined with whitewashed buildings, iron-grilled windows, and churches dating to the 16th and 17th centuries. Seven churches remain standing in the historic core, each with a distinct architectural style reflecting different periods of colonial influence. The Iglesia de Santa Bárbara is notable for its octagonal baroque tower — one of the only examples of this style in Colombia.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in the nearby town of Aracataca, but he drew heavily on Mompox in his fiction. The isolation of the place — its heat, its stillness, its sense of time suspended — appears throughout his work. That quality is still present. The town moves slowly, particularly during the dry season. Life happens on the sidewalks in the evenings, when residents drag chairs outside and the streets fill with conversation.

Mompox is also known for its filigree goldsmithing tradition. Local artisans produce delicate jewelry using techniques passed down over generations — thin threads of gold or silver twisted and soldered into intricate patterns. The work is sold in small workshops throughout the historic center. It is one of the few places in Colombia where this craft survives at scale.

Getting there requires effort. The nearest commercial airport is in El Banco, from which boats and minibuses continue to Mompox. Some travelers arrive by boat along the Magdalena, a journey of several hours from Magangué. The difficulty of access is part of what has preserved the town. Mompox receives far fewer visitors than Cartagena — perhaps a few hours' drive away in terms of the wider Colombian route — and the contrast in atmosphere is striking. Cartagena is polished and tourist-facing; Mompox is lived-in, quiet, and largely indifferent to outside attention.

The Holy Week celebrations in Mompox are considered among the most significant in Colombia. Elaborate processions fill the riverside streets at night, with candles and religious statues carried through the town in a tradition that dates to the colonial era. Accommodation books out months in advance for this period, but outside Holy Week the town is easy to visit independently and remains genuinely uncrowded.

Credit: Pedro Szekely, Flickr

Jardin is a small municipality in the southwest of Antioquia department, situated in a steep valley about 140 kilometers from Medellín. It has the kind of main plaza — wide, tiled, edged with flowering trees and painted cafés — that appears on lists of Colombia's most beautiful towns, yet visitor numbers don't reflect that reputation. The town sits below the influence of more prominent coffee region destinations like Salento, which draws significantly more international traffic.

The coffee produced in and around Jardin is grown on steep mountainsides at elevations above 1,700 meters. Fincas in the surrounding hills offer tours covering the full process from picking to cup. The terrain here is more vertical and dramatic than in parts of the Eje Cafetero that tourists typically visit — some hillside farms are accessible only by jeep or on foot. The altitude and volcanic soil produce beans with pronounced acidity and complexity.

The town is architecturally coherent in a way that many Colombian towns are not. Antioqueño colonial architecture — characterized by two-story buildings with ornate wooden balconies painted in bright colors — lines the streets around the central plaza and extends outward. The Basílica Menor de la Inmaculada Concepción anchors the plaza and is visible from most of the town.

Beyond the center, the surrounding countryside is crossed by hiking trails leading to waterfalls, viewpoints, and indigenous Emberá communities. The Cueva del Esplendor — a waterfall that drops through a hole in a cave ceiling — is one of the more dramatic natural features in the area. It requires a guided half-day hike to reach.

A cable car connects the town center to a hillside viewpoint above Jardin, offering views across the valley and into the surrounding mountains. It is one of the more accessible ways to appreciate the landscape without a full hike.

Jardin has a small but functional tourist infrastructure: guesthouses around the plaza, coffee shops that serve locally grown beans, and guides who know the trails. The town sees Colombian domestic tourists on weekends, particularly from Medellín, but remains largely off the international circuit. Getting there from Medellín takes roughly three hours by bus, with several departures daily.

The contrast with Salento — which draws large crowds and has developed accordingly — is significant. In Jardin, the finca tours are smaller, the streets are quieter, and the texture of everyday Colombian life in a coffee-growing town is harder to miss.

Villa de Leyva, Colombia

Credit: Juan Felipe, Pexels

Villa de Leyva sits on a dry plateau in Boyacá department, about 40 kilometers from Tunja and three to four hours from Bogotá by road. It was founded in 1572 and declared a national monument in 1954, a designation that has frozen its colonial architecture in place and restricted new construction in the historic core. The result is one of the most visually coherent colonial towns in Colombia: cobblestone streets, whitewashed walls, and a central plaza that is among the largest in the Americas.

That plaza — the Plaza Mayor — is genuinely vast. Paved with cobblestones and measuring roughly 14,000 square meters, it gives the town a sense of scale unusual for a small mountain settlement. On weekdays it is nearly empty. On weekends it fills with vendors and visitors from Bogotá, but outside high season the crowds are manageable.

The area around Villa de Leyva has a secondary identity as a paleontological site. The surrounding rock formations date from the Cretaceous period and have produced significant fossil finds. El Fósil, a small museum several kilometers outside the town, displays the skeleton of a kronosaurus — a large marine reptile — excavated locally. The fossil is presented in a simple structure that belies its scientific significance.

Other attractions in the surrounding area include the Convento del Santo Ecce Homo, a 17th-century monastery with a courtyard that retains its original flagstones and walls. The El Infiernito archaeoastronomical site, where standing stone monoliths are believed to have been used by the Muisca people to track the solar calendar and determine agricultural cycles, is also within easy reach.

Villa de Leyva has a functioning tourist economy — boutique hotels, restaurants, and weekend visitor traffic from Bogotá — but remains considerably less visited than Cartagena and is entirely off the itinerary of most international travelers who focus on the classic Colombia circuit. The altitude, around 2,100 meters, keeps the climate cool and dry compared to coastal or lowland destinations.

The Boyacá region more broadly rewards exploration. The surrounding landscape is marked by dramatic ravines, high-altitude wetlands called páramos, and small towns that see almost no foreign visitors at all. Villa de Leyva works well as a base for several days in the Andean interior.

Credit: Dpasten, Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Samaipata is a small town in Santa Cruz department, in Bolivia's lowland east, about 120 kilometers west of the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. It sits at approximately 1,650 meters elevation, which gives it a comfortable climate compared to the hot lowlands below. The town itself is pleasant — a mix of Bolivian families and a small community of foreign long-term residents, with a handful of restaurants and guesthouses — but the main reason to visit is the pre-Columbian archaeological site on the hill above the valley.

El Fuerte de Samaipata is one of the most unusual and least-visited UNESCO World Heritage sites in South America, designated by UNESCO in 1998. It consists primarily of a massive sandstone rock formation covering roughly two hectares, carved by a pre-Inca culture into a series of channels, niches, pools, tanks, and zoomorphic figures. A large central area is lined with carved channels and what appear to be ceremonial platforms. The Inca later incorporated the site into their own ceremonial and administrative network, and evidence of Inca construction is visible alongside older carvings.

What makes El Fuerte distinctive is the scale of the carving. The entire surface of the rock has been shaped, not just isolated sections. The full purpose of the channels and niches is not definitively established — theories range from ritual use to water management to astronomical observation — and the site carries an openness to interpretation that more thoroughly excavated sites lack. There is no reconstruction, no replica, and minimal on-site interpretation beyond a small museum near the entrance.

Samaipata also serves as a gateway to sites related to Che Guevara's guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1966 and 1967, which passed through this region. La Higuera, the village where he was captured and killed in October 1967, is accessible from here, as is Vallegrande, where his body was publicly displayed. This history is central to Bolivian national narrative and draws visitors interested in 20th-century Latin American politics.

The town has good walking trails in the surrounding hills, and the valley offers some of the most accessible Andean cloud forest in Bolivia. Getting there from Santa Cruz de la Sierra takes two to three hours by bus or shared taxi along a paved road. Santa Cruz has direct international flights, making Samaipata more accessible than its obscurity might suggest.

Credit: Tom D'Arby, Pexels

Sucre is Bolivia's constitutional capital — the seat of the judicial branch and the city designated as the national capital in Bolivia's constitution — though La Paz has long served as the seat of the executive and legislative branches. This jurisdictional reality is part of what keeps Sucre off the main tourist radar: visitors associate the capital of Bolivia with La Paz, and Sucre ends up treated as a secondary stop if it appears on the itinerary at all.

The city was founded in 1538 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991. Its colonial center is exceptionally well preserved. A local regulation has long required buildings in the historic core to maintain white exteriors, giving the city the nickname La Ciudad Blanca. The result is a visually unified streetscape that feels less like a curated museum than a functioning city that simply never had reason to modernize its architecture.

Sucre sits in a broad valley in the Bolivian highlands at approximately 2,750 meters elevation — lower than La Paz's 3,640 meters, which makes it significantly more comfortable for travelers concerned about altitude. The climate is mild year-round owing to the altitude and the sheltered valley setting.

The most remarkable attraction in the area is not in the city center. About five kilometers from Sucre, at a site called Cal Orck'o, a cement factory exposed a cliff face containing one of the largest and most diverse collections of Cretaceous dinosaur footprints ever found. The tracks were laid down approximately 68 million years ago and include prints from multiple species. A park called Parque Cretácico has been established at the site. Visitors see the cliff from elevated viewing platforms — the footprint surface itself is steep and fragile — and a museum provides geological and paleontological context.

The city has good infrastructure for independent travelers: hostels, midrange hotels, restaurants, Spanish-language schools, and reliable connections to other Bolivian destinations by bus or air. It is a more comfortable base for exploring the Bolivian interior than either La Paz or Potosí, and it connects well to the road south toward the Salar de Uyuni.

Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina

Credit:  Tanenhaus, Flickr

The Quebrada de Humahuaca is a narrow mountain valley in the province of Jujuy, in the far northwest of........

© Quartz