Food tour Bogota: 13+ tastings in La Candelaria

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Free cancellationTravelers' pick

1/11

Duration4h

GroupUp to 8

LanguagesEN

Mobile ticketAccepted

Bogotá's Street Food & Coffee: What 13 Tastings Teach You

You'll taste 13+ dishes and drinks across Bogotá's downtown, guided by a local foodie through markets, street stalls, and century-old restaurants. The group stays small (8 people max), which means you move at a pace that lets you actually talk to vendors and your guide, not just photograph the food. You finish with a coffee workshop at Casa Magola, and the whole thing takes 3.5 to 4 hours depending on how long the group lingers at each stop.

Step-by-step itinerary

Bogota food tour with tastings and activities

Visit La Perseverancia Market
Learn about exotic fruits
Explore a local chicheria
Taste lechona at hole-in-the-wall eatery
Try innovative ajiaco soup
Sample buñuelos pastry
Play a round of tejo
Enjoy cold beer or juice
Eat tamale with hot chocolate
Attend coffee workshop at Casa Magola

The Experience

The market is already moving when you arrive at La Perseverancia. Your guide — someone who actually eats here, not just talks about it — is waiting to walk you through the stalls, pointing out fruits you've never heard of and explaining why the vendors know their names. This is where the Bogotá food tour starts: not with a speech about Colombian cuisine, but with your hands holding something unfamiliar and your guide saying "try this" in a way that makes you want to.

Over the next three and a half hours, you'll move through the old town in a group of no more than eight people, stopping at places that don't have English menus or Instagram accounts. A hole-in-the-wall that does only lechona — roasted suckling pig with skin so crisp it shatters — sits next to a 200-year-old restaurant where tamale comes wrapped in banana leaf and served with hot chocolate so thick it's almost a paste. You'll try ajiaco soup, buñuelos (deep-fried pastries that taste nothing like what the name suggests), and a round of tejo, Colombia's national game, which involves throwing metal discs at a board rigged with small explosives. It's louder and more chaotic than you'd expect, and the beer or juice that follows tastes better because of it. A truly local chicheria — the kind of place tourists don't usually find — sits somewhere in the middle of all this, grounding the tour in how people actually eat here, not how guidebooks say they do.

The coffee workshop closes out the afternoon at Casa Magola, a café in La Candelaria near the Plaza de Bolívar. By then you've had thirteen tastings and enough walking to know your feet, so the workshop feels less like a lesson and more like sitting down to understand why Colombia's beans matter. Your guide explains the roast, the altitude, the soil — the things that separate good coffee from the kind you forget. The tour ends there, a short walk from the Museo Botero, and your guide can point you toward transport back to your hotel if you need it.

What’s included

All 13+ food tastings and bottled water throughout the tour, a professional foodie guide, a round of tejo with a local beverage, a coffee tasting workshop at Casa Magola, and a small-group experience capped at 8 guests. Your guide can help arrange transport back to your hotel at the end.

Good to know

Moderate physical levelStroller friendlyPets welcomePublic transport nearbyNot for pregnant travelers

Operated by A Chef's Tour

Is this one for you?Best for travelers who want to eat like a local without arranging stops themselves — the guide knows which stalls are worth your time and which dishes define Bogotá's food culture, so you spend your energy tasting, not deciding where to go next.