Cristo Rey, Museo La Tertulia and Downtown Cali Private Tour

Overview

A private full-day tour covering Cristo Rey, the hilltop Christ statue overlooking Cali, Museo La Tertulia's modern art collection, and a walk through downtown Cali, built to help you get your bearings in a vibrant Colombian city without navigating it yourself.

This tour is exclusively for your own group, helping you overcome the language barrier and discover places you might otherwise miss, without the hassle of hiring a car or navigating unfamiliar public transport.

Highlights

• Cristo Rey Visit the hilltop Christ the King statue with sweeping views over the Cauca Valley.
• Museo La Tertulia See Colombian and international modern art at one of Cali's leading museums.
• Downtown Cali Walk through the heart of the city with a guide who knows it well.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

A private full-day tour covering Cristo Rey, the hilltop Christ statue overlooking Cali, Museo La Tertulia's modern art collection, and a walk through downtown Cali, built to help you get your bearings in a vibrant Colombian city without navigating it yourself. This tour is exclusively for your own group, helping you overcome the language barrier and discover places you might otherwise miss, without the hassle of hiring a car or navigating unfamiliar public transport.

Cristo Rey, the hilltop statue this tour starts at, stands 26 meters tall on the Cerro de los Cristales — 21 meters of iron-and-concrete figure on a 5-meter pedestal, with a total mass of around 464 tons. It was inaugurated on October 25, 1953, timed to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of Colombia's War of a Thousand Days, and it was paid for almost entirely through voluntary donations from Cali residents rather than a single wealthy patron — a detail locals still point to as evidence of how much the monument belongs to the city rather than any institution. The sculptor, Italian-born artist Alideo Tazzioli, took over the project after the original commissioned artist abandoned it partway through. At roughly two-thirds the height of Rio de Janeiro's more famous Christ the Redeemer, Cristo Rey is smaller but arguably better placed for photography — the Cerro de los Cristales viewpoint puts the entire Cauca Valley and Cali's grid below you in one unbroken sweep.

Museo La Tertulia, the second stop, didn't start as a museum at all. In 1956, Maritza Uribe de Urdinola and a circle of Cali intellectuals began meeting informally in a house in the San Antonio neighborhood to talk politics, art, and culture during a period of dictatorship in Colombia — a literal tertulia, the Spanish word for that kind of gathering. The group only became a formal Museum of Modern Art in 1968, once the city diverted the Cali River to build Avenida Colombia and left a vacant lot where the museum's current building now stands — the first purpose-built exhibition space of its kind in the country at the time. Today the museum holds Colombia's largest paper-based art collection (around 1,500 works) alongside a notable Picasso lithograph, split across three separate buildings that include an arthouse cinema.

The downtown walk that closes out the day isn't just filler between two sights — Cali's colonial-era core, laid out not far from where the city was formally founded in 1536, is still the administrative and religious heart of a metro area of well over two million people, and seeing it on foot with a guide makes the jump from 16th-century street grid to modern Colombian city much easier to follow than it would be glancing at it from a moving car.