Volunteering is one of the best ways to immerse yourself in a country's culture and make connections that can last a lifetime.

But what is it exactly?

An increasingly popular way to travel, volunteering gives opportunities to travelers, providing accommodation and food for their hard work and skills. This helps make travel a lot cheaper and more accessible.

Not only that, but volunteering is fun, gratifying, and engrossing. You'll learn more about the country you are in and its culture through spending time with your host. Not to mention brush up on your language skills.

Volunteering placements can last between a couple of weeks and several months. It depends on whether you want to stay and get on well with your host. It is very rare to find placements for less than a week – after all, hosts don't want to keep training up volunteers.

Volunteering opportunities in a developing country like Colombia are a dime a dozen. However, you have to be careful you're not offering free labor for a job that could be taken by a skilled worker.

Regardless, Colombia boasts incredible natural diversity, meaning some amazing volunteering opportunities can be found. You could delve into the depths of the Amazon, work the land on a Colombian coffee farm, or earn your keep in the tropical paradise of the Caribbean Coast.

So what kind of work can you expect from volunteering? For starters, not everything will be a charity project that leaves you feeling all warm and bubbly. Instead, you should expect:

• Teaching English Abroad: Very rewarding and possibly the most common form of volunteering in Colombia. However, many will pay for the service, and you could easily make some decent money on the road for the same thing.

• Farm work: Some would say this is the original kind of volunteering. Opportunities where you trade your time for helping farmers plant and harvest crops. In a country renowned for producing coffee and chocolate in lush landscapes, that's not a bad thing.

• Working in a hostel or lodge: Hostels and lodges frequently recruit backpackers to help them out around the property. This might mean cooking, cleaning, leading tours, etc. These are often in exchange for accommodation and food while providing plenty of free days to do whatever you want. Sounds like a fair trade.

• General labor: This can take many forms but is primarily being advertised by farmers and lodging owners, where volunteers chip in with odd jobs here and there. This is where you need to be careful that you're not taking a paid job away from a skilled laborer.

• Caring for animals: This is what most people hope for when looking to volunteer. Who doesn't love working with animals? But these are also opportunities where you need to be careful and do your research. Many advertisements are not all they're cracked up to be.

Volunteering is well suited to those traveling slowly through Colombia. It gives you a chance to stop, breathe, and give something back to a wonderful country.

One of the trickiest things with volunteering is knowing where to start. With that in mind, we've rounded up our three favorite sites for finding amazing volunteering opportunities in Colombia.

Be warned that you will be charged a small fee to register on the site. We recommend picking one of the three and sticking with it.

Best Sites to Find Volunteering Opportunities in Colombia

Work For Digital Nomads

Several multinational companies – including Meta, IBM, and Google – have set up shop in Colombia's big cities, marking their HQ in Latin America. There is also a sizable startup scene in the country's biggest cities, Medellín and Bogotá.

This might not be relevant for those not sticking around in Colombia, which is unlikely given the complexity of applying for a working visa. However, it cements Colombia's status as a hub for creative industries. Wherever these hubs pop up, opportunities for digital nomads to pick up exciting new freelance gigs tend to follow.

That's just one of many reasons why Colombia is perfect for digital nomads.

From a lifestyle perspective, the weather's great year-round, it's a cheap country to live in, accommodation doesn't cost the Earth, and there's so damn much to see and do in your downtime.

From a work perspective, there are loads of hip co-working spaces, great WiFi, good mobile coverage, and a thriving digital nomad community to connect with.

Medellín is regarded as the digital nomad capital of South America, let alone Colombia – a wonderful sentiment for the transformation of the former murder capital of the world.

Though not as popular as Medellín, other cities, including Bogotá, Calí, and Cartagena, are attracting more and more digital nomads.

If you're just starting out as a digital nomad, get yourself signed up to Fiverr and Upwork to find your next paycheck.

Teaching English in Colombia 

Teaching English is a popular way to make money while traveling, and Colombia is no exception. You can teach classes remotely from a laptop, make some money on the road, and positively impact the lives of others by boosting their language skills.

But to teach English, you're going to need a TEFL qualification. 

An acronym for 'Teaching English as a Foreign Language,' this certification is your golden ticket to travel freedom. An actual degree from a top university will go a long way too.

To get TEFL certified, you must sign up for a course, of which several are available. It requires some investment and time – usually around 120 hours. But it's well worth it in the long term.

One quick Google search will reveal a bunch of companies offering TEFL courses. In our view, MyTefl is the best of the bunch, one of the cheapest and most reputable too.

A fully qualified teacher with a degree and TEFL qualifications could expect to earn 7,000,000 COP per month in Colombia, which will go a long way here.

Without an actual degree, that figure would be closer to 3,500,000 COP. That's still a pretty good sum for most travelers.

One of the best places to find work, especially for online teaching, is Cambly. Cambly is great for those looking to teach for the first time, and you don't need a TEFL certificate before being paired up with students from around the world. 

An alternative for those with more experience teaching English is iTalki, which allows you to build your own courses and pays much more.

If teaching online is your cup of tea, most companies will ask for a minimum of eight hours per week – or one traditional working day.

If you want to teach in person, the demand for teachers in Colombia is as high as it is lucrative, especially considering that English is mandatory in the Colombian curriculum.

Other WORKING OPPORTUNITIES

Outside of Colombia's major cities, you may find it difficult to find paid work. The jobs market is competitive enough for Colombians without throwing travelers into the mix.

Here and there, you may be able to find an odd job working at a hostel or a restaurant, but the money won't be amazing.

That said, if your Spanish is as good as your native English, this is generally seen as a big plus and sets you apart as a candidate.