Colombia held a nudist festival at the seat of its government
The first such gathering at Bogotá's Plaza de Bolívar drew 317 people, backed by a Constitutional Court decision that separates nudity from lewd conduct.
Three hundred seventeen people gathered nude at Plaza de Bolívar on June 14, some of them staying through rain to finish the day’s activities. The event, organized through the Naturismo Nudismo Colombia and Al Natural and promoted as the first festival of its kind at the plaza, drew participants from other Colombian cities and abroad. Organizers plan a follow-up: the 11th National Naturism Gathering, set for August 6–9 in Anapoima.
Plaza de Bolívar houses Colombia’s Congress, the Palace of Justice, the Cathedral, and City Hall. In June 2016, photographer Spencer Tunick gathered more than 6,000 people nude in the same square for his first Bogotá installation, staged as a statement on peace as the government closed in on its accord with the FARC. The June festival was organized by the naturist community itself, without an outside artist attached, a decade later.
Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2023, in Sentencia C-069, that police can no longer treat nudity itself as “exhibicionismo.” The case tested Article 33 of the national police and coexistence code (Ley 1801 of 2016). The court struck the code’s standard, nudity that “generates discomfort in the community,” as unconstitutionally vague, and narrowed what remains punishable to exposing genitals in order to harass or commit sexual violence. Protest, cultural expression, and everyday nude living fall outside the sanction.
The distinction the court drew, between nudity and sexual conduct, is the one that recurs in nudity law across the United States and Europe, where it is usually decided against non-sexual nudity. Colombia’s high court decided the other way. Three years later, the naturist community held a 317-person event in the country’s most prominent public square, seemingly without incident.
Nudismo Colombia describes its work as non-sexual, built around art, education, philosophy, and literature. That framing matches the standard the court set. Whether police and the public treat the next gathering at Plaza de Bolívar the same way is untested. 🪐