I have watched Colombia move from “the place your parents warned you about” to a fixture on every Canadian expat forum in about a decade. That shift is real, but it has also produced a lot of breathless marketing, and marketing is exactly what I try to strip out before I put money anywhere. So this is my attempt to look at Colombia real estate for Canadians the way I would look at any other line in a portfolio: what you actually get, what it actually costs, what can actually go wrong, and whether it beats the alternatives I already write about – Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The short version: Colombia is one of the genuinely cheap, genuinely liveable markets left, the buying process is more solid than its reputation suggests, and there is a clean tax treaty with Canada. But it is a peso market with real currency risk, the short-term rental rules are a minefield, and financing barely exists for foreigners. It suits a specific kind of buyer and punishes the careless one.