Two days of hiking, 1,200 stone steps and a turbulent river crossing behind me, I gazed up at the ruins of an ancient city in the Colombian jungle. Circular stone outcroppings, carefully arranged by the area’s indigenous Tayrona builders, framed grassy clearings in the forest before disappearing up a steep slope. As I squinted through the trees, still drenched in early-morning shadows, I heard murmurs of bewilderment rising from my fellow hikers. That’s it? Many had previously visited Machu Picchu, and expected something akin to the Peru city's elaborate citadel. By comparison, the 1,200-year-old ruins we had come to see in the mountains along Colombia's Caribbean coast appeared underwhelming. But I had come to Ciudad Perdida — the “Lost City,” or Teyuna to the local indigenous people — in December to see how the site was helping reshape Colombia's image after years of bloody conflict. Colombia, widely known to most Americans as the home of Marxist rebels and drug kingpins like Pablo Escobar, has been seen largely through the lens of shows such as "Narcos," which focus on violence, poverty and the drug trade. Partly as a result, Ciudad Perdida receives far fewer visitors than similar South American sites like Machu Picchu, despite being 650 years older. But as I hiked the 27 miles to the Lost City — on foot through deep jungle, up and down hills and through rain-swollen rivers — I learned from my guides that Colombia has been working to change this perception. With a growing economy and a new peace deal with the country's main rebel group, many wanted to leave the past behind them, and found showing off their archaeological jewel a good way to do so. Heat, humidity and relentless mosquitoes put up significant obstacles as we hiked up to Ciudad Perdida's peak at 3,600 feet above sea level. Along the way, we passed open fields that had been cleared for grazing cattle; indigenous villages for the area’s semi-autonomous Arhuaco, the Kogi and Wiwa people, descendants of the Tayrona; and pristine stands of old-growth forest. Though archaeologists suspect that Ciudad Perdida was the region’s political and religious center, with up to 8,000 residents at one point, it was abandoned during the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s. Local indigenous groups never lost track of the city’s location, but it only became known to the wider world in 1972, when a group of treasure hunters found the stone staircase leading to the city that they named "Green Hell." Gold figurines and ceramic urns from the city began to appear in the local black market, drawing the attention of archaeologists who reached the site in 1976 and restored it over the following six years. In the 1980s local people with few other options for earning income set up coca operations in the thick jungle of the Santa Marta Mountains. That drew the attention of government forces, communist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups alike, leading to conflict over control of the land and indiscriminate killing. But over the past few years, an influx of tourism has created a safer, more sustainable vision of the future for Colombians, including the indigenous people whose ancestors built the Lost City. Many tour companies operating in the area hire indigenous guides, and one, Wiwa Tourism, is owned and operated by the Wiwa tribe. After Colombia’s constitutional reforms in 1991, indigenous groups were given back some of the land that had been taken during the Spanish conquest, and Ciudad Perdida now sits in an indigenous reserve; tour companies like Wiwa Tourism strike a fine balance between earning revenue for the local people and preventing overexploitation of the site and its culture. I thought of this as we arrived at the city on the morning of the third day, not expecting to find the site almost empty of people. Upon seeing those first few stone terraces in the forest clearings, I tried to picture Ciudad Perdida as the bustling city it must once have been. As we hiked further up the mountainside, I reached out my hand to touch the stones, imagining who laid them there over 1,000 years ago. Later, as we relaxed back at camp, I wished I could climb those 1,200 steps again.