Road Tunnels in Colombia — Complete List by Length

• 17entries listed
• 8.56 kmlongest bore
• 1999–2009openings span
• 41.48 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

The middle half of the table runs from 1 km to 4.99 km, and that band is where most of the engineering on this page actually sits. Eighth on the list is Santa Rosa* at 1.53 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 7.37 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 13 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Colombia, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Lengths for Colombia are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 220 m and not a rounded figure. The 13 rows for Colombia are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2009 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

3 of the 13 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 41.48 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

The table below lists 17 entries with a recorded length, each giving a name, a length in metres and, where documented, the year of opening. The tunnel column names 17 distinct entries on this page, La Linea and de Oriente (Aburra) among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Reading the figures

Further down the table, Buenavista is recorded at 4.56 km and Sumapaz at 4.1 km. Read down the length (m) column, the 17 values run from 207 m to 8 555 m with a midpoint at 1 530 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Dated entries run from 1999 to 2009, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 5 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 17 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Dep. and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Roughly 5 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 10 distinct places and structures — Cajamarca, Gómez and Martínez among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

A new scheme in Colombia would have to beat 8.56 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 38.9 times the shortest and 3.6 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

The dated entries carry 5 distinct opening years across 10 years, and the median opening year is 2002. The material on this page is held in 4 captions rather than in running text, 36 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.