A glossy new voice is joining the conversation about how Colombia eats, travels and enjoys itself. Placeres, a print magazine launched by Spanish businessman Jaime Polanco Soutullo, unveiled its second issue this week at La Cometa art gallery in Bogotá, and from January it will step up to a quarterly schedule.
The publication pitches itself as "the language of good taste" — a lifestyle title covering gastronomy, travel, hotels, wine, art, design, fashion and watchmaking. That may sound like a standard luxury formula, but Polanco is deliberately pushing back against both ostentation and click-speed media. Pleasure, in his framing, is about curiosity and attention to detail rather than possessions. "Good taste is not inherited," he said at the launch. "It is cultivated, questioned, and shared around the finest of tables."
Food is the anchor. Coverage stretches across Colombia, Latin America and Spain, using cuisine as a lens on places, traditions and the chefs, producers and restaurants reinventing them. Wine and drinks get treated similarly — less as products than as doorways to landscapes and the people behind them. Around that sits travel writing on characterful hotels, plus art, music and literature.
Polanco knows the media business well. During a long career at Spain's Grupo Prisa he worked on international expansion, and his Colombian ties run through Caracol Radio and the digital outlet Confidencial Colombia. Placeres is a passion project more than a profit play — he told Colombia One he simply wants it to break even while championing slow, high-quality storytelling in a market dominated by instant digital content.
Why should travellers care? Placeres is a genuinely useful window into Colombia beyond Cartagena's old town and the coffee trail highlights. Its focus on regional cuisines, local products and emerging dining scenes, alongside comparable stories from Latin America and Spain, makes it a good pre-trip read for anyone planning a food-driven visit — or just curious about how Colombians themselves are documenting their own culinary moment. A print title betting on depth over speed is rare enough anywhere; doing it in Bogotá makes it worth watching.
