Data for Bogotá, Medellín, the coffee region and Cartagena, installed before you fly. Colombia is on the Americas plan, so the same eSIM carries on to Ecuador, Peru and Panama — and keeps the ride-hailing app working, which here is half of the safety advice.
The Colombia plan covers Colombia only.
The same 10 GB in a package that keeps working past Colombia.
16 other countries share the package with Colombia. A few of them:
What's included, when it starts, and how to get connected.
No dar papaya — don’t hand anyone the opportunity — is how Colombians sum up street sense, and a Colombian dictionary of usage records the saying that it is the eleventh commandment. The twelfth, the saying goes, is never wasting any papaya you are given. A phone left on a café table is papaya. So is a taxi hailed on the street at night.
Migración Colombia’s online pre-registration, Check-MIG, opens 72 hours before the flight and closes an hour before it. The UK Foreign Office lists it as optional; it speeds up the passport queue, so do it anyway. Then the altitude: Bogotá sits at 2,640 metres, cool enough to be nicknamed La Nevera, the fridge. Take the first day slowly and pack a jacket for the evenings.
Disney’s team spent two weeks in Colombia in 2018 and came back with the landscape of Salento and the Cocora valley and the architecture of Barichara, a whitewashed colonial town in Santander; a Barichara guide even inspired Mirabel’s look. The wax palms in the film are real — Colombia’s national tree and the tallest palm in the world. Salento has the queues. Barichara has the quiet.
Both countries claim it, and the honest answer — it is some 3,000 years older than the border — pleases nobody. Colombia has about 75 regional versions, from Antioquia’s arepa paisa to the Caribbean coast’s arepa de huevo, fried with an egg inside. Pick a side quietly, and wash it down with a tinto: here a small black coffee, in Spain a glass of red wine.
In 2019 Medellín demolished Escobar’s Mónaco building, by then a stop for foreign tourists, to make room for a park honouring the thousands of cartel victims — the city’s clearest statement of which story it wants told. Take the metro to San Javier instead and ride Comuna 13’s outdoor escalators with a local guide: the comeback story, told by the people who lived it.
Colombia is on the Americas plan, so the same eSIM works in Bogotá, Medellín, Salento and Cartagena without anything to change. Coverage follows the local networks: strong in the cities and on the main roads, patchier in the coffee hills and along the Caribbean coast once you leave the towns, and thin to absent on the trails — the Cocora valley loop, the walk into Tayrona, the multi-day treks.
Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Brazil and the rest of the Americas list share the package, so the trip that continues to Quito, Lima or Panama City keeps the same allowance; the phone picks up a partner network after the border. In the cities, the data’s most important job is the ride home: order the car in an app at the door rather than hailing one on the street.
Answers about data, coverage and setup for Colombia.
Yes. Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Brazil and the rest of the Americas list share the package with Colombia, so the trip that carries on to Quito, Lima or Panama City keeps the same allowance; the phone picks up a partner network after the border. Panama is a flight or a boat, though: the Pan-American Highway stops at the Darién Gap, and there is no road at all for about 106 km.
In the towns and cities, yes. Away from them the signal thins: on the Cocora valley loop, on the dirt roads between the fincas, inside Tayrona and on multi-day treks, where no network reaches far. The UK Foreign Office puts it plainly — rural connections are often limited. Download maps, tickets and bookings while you are in town, and treat the trail as offline.
Not really, and the eSIM is not the reason. Nequi, Bancolombia’s wallet, and Bre-B, the instant transfers Colombia’s central bank launched in October 2025, move money between Colombian accounts, which visitors do not have. Cards and phone wallets work in cities, hotels and chains; taxis, markets and small towns want cash. The eSIM keeps the banking app, the ride-hailing app and the map working while you pay.
