El Dorado International Airport

The El Dorado Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento International Airport (IATA: BOG, ICAO: SKBO), better known as Airport from El Dorado, is the main airport in Colombia. It is located within Bogotá, about 12 km (kilometers) west of the Bogotá International Center, in the towns of Engativá and Fontibón. It occupies an approximate area of 6.9 km² (square kilometers).

It is the first airport in Latin America in terms of cargo volume, the third most important airport in Latin America in terms of passenger volume, after the International Airport of Mexico City and the International Airport of São Paulo-Guarulhos, and one of the one of the most important hubs in South America because it has a privileged and strategic position, since it is located in the middle part of the American continent, facilitating its communication with all the continents. The airport received its name in 1959 in memory of the legend of El Dorado. In 2012 its name was changed in honor of the politician Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento.

Won the Skytrax award for the best staff in South America in 2016 and in 2022, as well as first place in the list of the best airports in Latin America for the second time in a row. On the other hand, in the list of the best airports in the world, El Dorado was ranked 42nd in the 2017 list.

Description

El Dorado International Airport has two passenger terminals:

The Dorado is the main airport of Avianca.

Terminal 1 or T1 was inaugurated in 2012. It has two levels, the lower and the upper. These are distinguished by arrivals and departures, respectively, whether national and/or international. It also has 32 boarding bridges. 26 airlines operate in this terminal with more than 70 destinations.

The building is shaped like the letter “h”, and is divided into two piers: the international and the national. The first one was opened in 2012. It has ten boarding bridges and five more shared with the national pier. The emigration and immigration process is quite slow, although it has the presence of automatic migration machines and biometrics with the iris.

Terminal 2 or T2 is the building formerly called Puente Aéreo, an attached terminal that, since its inauguration in 1981, currently exclusively serves Easy Fly and Satena flights. Avianca transferred its national operations to Terminal 1, and therefore the Terminal 2 building received the flights of the state airline SATENA and the low-cost airlines EasyFly and VivaColombia.

In addition, the airport has a modern cargo terminal, inaugurated in 2010, which handles the largest movement of air cargo in Colombia and Latin America, which amounts to 637,153 tons in 2012. It is also divided into two sections: that of national flights and that of international flights.

In 2017, new works were delivered to El Dorado Airport, including 50 elevators, 20 escalators, almost 24,000 m² (square meters) of commercial areas with more than 30 brands, 1,669 parking spaces, six VIP lounges (among them, an airport lounge and a Copa Club lounge), and the capacity to handle more than 7,200 suitcases per hour, among others.

Regarding positions, before starting the transformation El Dorado had 20 contact and 10 remote, and now it has 39 contact and 13 remote. Both the national and international docks were expanded. With this, it is sought that the airport continues to be the best in Latin America and one of the best worldwide.

Its location is at Avenida Calle 26 #103-09. In the Town of Fontibón.

History

The El Dorado passenger terminal was designed during the military regime of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to replace the Techo Airport. Its construction began in 1955 and it entered service at the end of 1959 with the other dependencies of the then new airport.

The Sociedad de Mejoras y Ornato de Bogotá was in charge of the external decoration of the airport. On September 29, after the ECA Board of Directors met, December 10, 1959 was set as the inauguration date.

On October 28, ECA manager René Van Meerbeke recommended placing the airport name in the central part of the building's façade; however, the name was the reason for great reflections: a short, short, easy-to-pronounce terrigenous name was sought and that recalled the aboriginal culture that occupied the Bogotá Sabana. Thus, El Dorado was chosen as the most appropriate name for the new terminal. After many discussions by academics headed by Professor Luis López de Mesa, Father Félix Restrepo and Alberto Miramón, this was determined by decree as the name of the airport, written without spaces, making up a single word.

On December 10, 1959, the Eldorado International Airport was inaugurated with a spectacular aeronautical exhibition, which began on December 6: 16 airplanes, 12 jet propulsion and four B-26s, were the ones that caused the most impression within the public.

In the files of the firm of architects and engineers Cuéllar, Serrano, Gómez y Cía., which participated in the construction of the airport and of the Sociedad de Mejoras y Ornato, there is no record of which was the company that manufactured the Eldorado sign; nor is the weight of the eight letters known, since they did not require maintenance since they were installed.

In 1981, Avianca undertook the construction of the Puente Aéreo Terminal inaugurated by then President Julio César Turbay Ayala as an annex airport to channel flights from Bogotá to Medellín, Miami, Cali and New York.

In 1990, the main dependencies of the Administrative Department of Civil Aeronautics, a state entity that replaced the defunct Colombian Aerodrome Company, began to operate from the third level of the terminal building. It is in this year when the building of the Aeronautical Studies Center appears. Likewise, in the central lands located in the eastern area of the airport property stands the National Air Navigation Center.

In 1998, the airport's second runway was inaugurated, which has received much disagreement from the residents of the nearby Fontibón area, due to the incessant air operations during the day and night.

In 2012, in accordance with Law 75 of 1989, which honors the memory of Luis Carlos Galán, Law 1529 of 2012 formalized the name change from “El Dorado International Airport” to “El Dorado Luis Carlos Galán International Airport Sarmiento", including the space between "El" and "Dorado", and the name of the Bumangués politician. This name change generated a strong controversy, especially due to the costs associated with it, and the non-existent relationship between Galán and El airport.

At the end of 2017, all the works corresponding to El Dorado International Airport were fully delivered. The airport passenger terminal went from 173,000 to 235,000 m² (square meters), with the possibility of serving up to 43,000,000 (forty-three million) people a year.

Due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19 pandemic in Colombia), which led to a national quarantine and restrictions on air travel, El Dorado International Airport temporarily suspended international and domestic commercial flights, with the exception of humanitarian flights, until September 1, 2020.

Since September 1, 2020, the airport reopened with 15 routes enabled in Colombia and, internationally, two flights to Miami. At the national level, there will be 15 new destinations from Bogotá as follows: Rionegro (Medellín) - Cali - Cartagena - Barranquilla - Pereira - Santa Marta - Bucaramanga - Cúcuta - Montería - San Andrés - Medellín - Ibagué - Villavicencio - Pasto - Leticia.

Renovation project

Windows of the national pier after the renovation of the years 2000.

National Pier Platform

The current demand for passengers has led to the development of a project to build a more modern airport with greater capacity, both for commercial and cargo flights. Initially, it had been planned to carry out only the remodeling and expansion of the current terminal.

For the process of creating the new terminal, the airport was handed over on February 7, 2007 in concession to the OPAIN consortium as the airport operating company, after a publicized and debated tender.

OPAIN, from the beginning, had proposed the demolition of the airport and had even presented a new design to replace it, but the Government strongly opposed it due to budgetary and legal reasons. The Government accepted OPAIN's proposal to demolish the building on March 14, 2008, after receiving it as a concession.

In order to support, at that time, a demand of 16,000,000 million passengers and 1,500,000 (one million five hundred thousand) tons of cargo per year, OPAIN planned to move the cargo terminal to allow the expansion of the passenger terminal and also guarantee access through at least one additional road to the existing one on Calle 26.

On September 19, 2007, the execution of Milestone 1 of the El Dorado modernization and expansion plan began. This consists of the expansion of the central hall of the existing terminal and the installation of the CUTE system in it. These works ended in March 2008, the month in which the execution of Milestone 2 began, which corresponds to the construction of the new cargo terminal, a new building for Aerocivil, a new fire station, a cargo administrative center and a quarantine building. This Milestone was completed in September 2009.

At the end of November 2009, construction began on Terminal 1, on the north side of the current terminal. This required the demolition of the national cargo terminals, whose operations were transferred to the old international cargo terminal (itself remodeled). The project was delivered at the end of July 2012 for operational testing. What today is called T1 or Terminal 1 began operating on October 19. Then the construction of the domestic flight areas began, corresponding to the south pier of the structure and part of the north pier.

The renovation process of the most important air terminal in Colombia was fully delivered in December 2017. In 10 years, the airport went from receiving 16,000,000 (sixteen million) to just over 35,000,000 (thirty and five million) passengers per year.

El Dorado II

In 2015, the project to build a satellite airport called El Dorado II was announced, which will complement the current operations of the main airport. It is expected that the new air terminal will be in operation by 2022. It will cost COP$3.5 trillion and expects to carry out 71,000 operations per year. It will be located between the municipalities of Madrid and Facatativá, in an area of 19.8 km² (kilometers square), in the department of Cundinamarca.

In 2018, it is expected to award and tender the El Dorado II project, which should be ready by 2022. In August 2018, ANI delivered studies and designs for the air terminal. A solar power plant is also expected.

However, the construction of said terminal was quite controversial, since it had not been analyzed in all its technical and operational aspects, for which reason the project has not been launched as of November 2022.

Airlines and destinations