Passing over the bleak, frozen _paramos_, or mountain deserts, wrapped in awful stillness by the great peaks rising above them, the scene suddenly changes as the road descends along the heavily wooded slopes and the country becomes alive with verdure and the sounds of birds. Below, in a still more summery clime, lies, perhaps, a beautiful little lozenge-shaped valley fringed about up the sides of the mountains with coffee plantations and groves of bamboo, or some other scene even more picturesque—and then, over equally sudden changes and different pictures of native life, the traveler goes on until there begin to appear extensive plantations with well-built houses and farm machinery, and, finally reaches the railway, which takes him, not unregretfully, from his guide and carries him up into the lofty _sabana_—the great altaplain on which Bogotá, the capital, is located. This plateau is a level plain, about seventy miles long by about thirty in width, containing some two thousand square miles of cleared, arable land. It lies 8700 feet above the sea in the very heart of the Eastern Cordillera, just below the fifth degree of north latitude, and ranges in temperature from fifty-nine to sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit the year around. From this plateau the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have administered the country since 1538. The _sabana_ is now covered with prosperous plantations belonging to rich Bogotaños. Bogotá lies on the eastern border. When Quesada, its founder, set foot on the _sabana_, he was struck by its resemblance to the broad plain of Santa Fé, in his native Granada, on which the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella encamped during the siege that was to put an end to the power of the Moors in Spain. He therefore called the new capital _Santa Fé de Bogotá_, and New Granada became the name of the northern viceroyalty which was carved out of the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1717. Both names have disappeared. The capital has reverted to its ancient Indian name of Bogotá, and the name of Granada, perpetuated until 1861 in the name of the Republic of New Granada, was succeeded in that year by that of the present Republic of Colombia. The site of the present city, some twelve miles southeast of the ancient Chibcha capital, was the location of the little Indian village of Tensaquilla, the pleasure resort of the Zipas, nestling, like the Spanish city of Granada, at the foot of two mountains—Monserrate and Guadelupe. Down these mountains tumble the little streams that make up the near-by Funza River, which spreads out over the plain and then plunges down into the upper waters of the Magdalena. On the far side of this great river runs the Central Cordillera, some ninety miles west of the capital, and on clear days the giant white-topped volcano, Tolima, 18,400 feet high, and the Mesa de Herveo, but sixty feet lower—constituting the culminating points in Colombia—are plainly visible.