Cali

Santiago de Cali, capital of the Valle del Cauca department, is Colombia's third-largest city and one of the most dynamic in south-western Latin America. Located in the Cauca River valley at 995 metres above sea level, it enjoys a year-round spring climate that has historically made sport and physical activity an essential part of daily life for its more than 2.25 million inhabitants. Its festive character, linked to salsa as a global musical and dance expression, coexists with an elite sporting tradition that sets it apart on the continent.

In sport, Cali has amassed a record that is hard to match in Latin America. It hosted the 1981 World Games — the first held on the American continent — and the 2021 World Athletics Road Running Championships. In 2021, the city organised the first-ever Junior Pan American Games, demonstrating world-class organisational capacity and sports infrastructure. Estadio Olímpico Pascual Guerrero, with its athletics and football facilities, and Coliseo El Pueblo — venue for the 2016 FIFA Futsal World Cup — are the emblems of that legacy.

This track record earned the city its most significant institutional sporting recognition in 2019: ACES Europe, through ACES América, proclaimed Cali at UNESCO headquarters in Paris as the first-ever American Capital of Sport. Cali thus became the city that inaugurated this distinction for the Americas, opening the path for a network of Latin American cities committed to sport as public policy and a driver of human development.

Beyond major events, Cali has shown that sport can be a vehicle for social transformation. With neighbourhoods such as Aguablanca, one of the country's most extensive poverty belts, the city has invested in community sport programmes in boxing, cycling and swimming, which have produced Olympic and world champions from highly vulnerable backgrounds. That synthesis of sporting excellence and social inclusion is perhaps the most precise definition of what Cali represents for Latin American sport.