Editorial method

What the directory covers

The directory covers the Distrito Capital and the towns of the Sabana de Bogotá that share its daily life, from Soacha in the south to Cajicá, Tocancipá and Facatativá. It is written for a player new to the city, a parent looking for a first club or class, a visitor with a free Sunday, and anyone who wants to know whether a club found online still meets.

No place is graded, ranked or recommended, and none pays to be listed. Lists start with the places whose chess is confirmed or dated, newest evidence first, and close with those still waiting for confirmation.

What is read for each card

Colombia publishes no public register of chess clubs, so most cards rest on the tournament server that the federation and the leagues use: its search rows name the organizer and the venue, while the tournament pages themselves often print only the title. The weekly agendas of BibloRed, the district library network, give the library clubs with their date, hour and age range. Pages of the IDRD and the city portal, a university timetable, a school form and one national radio report fill in the rest.

Each fact on a card ends in a small number that leads to its page, with a short quote in the original Spanish and the day the page was read. Two status lines open every card. The place line says whether the venue is open, closed or not known. The chess line gives the date of the newest sign of chess; a date taken from a notice is shown as the date given, since a notice is not yet a game.

When pages disagree, for instance on the street number of a hall, the card keeps both versions and names the page behind each.

Three marks on sources

A source is official when it comes from the place, its organizer, the district or a chess federation or league; secondary when a third party such as a newspaper, a radio station or a listing site reports it; unverified when it is user-posted or found in one place only.

The mark tells who speaks, not whether they are right. A tournament listing may name a hall that has since changed hands, and a radio report from 2023 may be the only trace of a club in the center. Read each mark together with its date.

Unknown stays unknown

Few chess places in Bogotá publish fees, opening hours or whether a visitor can simply sit down to play. Where no page states a fact, the card says “not stated by sources”. That never means no, free or closed; it means nobody has written it where it can be read.

If you know a page that fills such a gap, send it through the form. The fact is added with its date at the next revision.

What the directory does not judge

• No place, coach or tournament is given a grade, a score or a rank.
• Cards rest on published pages only; nobody from the project visits the halls.
• Entry fees and prices are repeated as published on the day of reading, not checked on site.
• Library agendas and club hours can change before the card does.
• The quality of teaching is not assessed; a coach’s title is compared with the FIDE profile only.
• Step-free access, safety, noise and parking are not looked at.
• Attendance on a given day is not counted.
• An empty field means the sources say nothing, never that the answer is no.

If a card concerns you

Club officers, organizers, librarians, coaches and players can correct a card through the submission form. A link to the page that carries the right information makes the change quick to confirm. Messages are read together at the next revision of the Bogotá directory.

Every correction is dated in the revision notes and shown on the card it concerns. A club or venue that would rather not be listed can ask for that, with its reasons, through the same form.

Reading dates and revisions

The pages behind the present cards were read up to October 14, 2026. The date beside each source on a card shows how old that fact is.

The whole directory is meant to be read again roughly every 6 months. In between, a series can change its mall or a library its afternoon without the card following. Each revision of the data or of this method goes into the revision notes, newest first, and older entries stay as they were written.

Who is behind it

Bogotá Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organizers, malls, academies or shops, runs no advertising and belongs to no federation, league or institute.

It exists because the facts about chess in Bogotá are scattered across tournament listings, library agendas and institutional pages that each hold one piece. The form on this site is the way to reach the project; no personal address is published.

Reusing the data

The whole directory can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per place with every source, mark and date. The license is stated inside the file.

Language models and other software can read a plain-text map of the site at llms.txt.

Considered and left out

Leads looked at and not listed: 23. The usual reasons are a hall that hosted one event and nothing more, a club or tournament in a town beyond the Sabana, or a club of the same name in another Colombian city. Each one is named in the dataset with its reason.

Points on the map

A card shows a map point when a source gives one or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds its street address. A point found that way is marked approximate, because it can land a few doors from the real entrance; in Bogotá’s grid of calles and carreras the search often finds no building at all, so most cards have no point.

No point is placed by hand; the site has no map of its own, and the map button opens openstreetmap.org. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License (ODbL).