THE dirt road that links the small town of Vista Hermosa in the department of Meta, in south-eastern Colombia, to the village of Santo Domingo is a slow and bone-breaking drive. But its tedium is relieved by magical bird life. Hoatzins, a kind of tropical pheasant, flap noisily between copses; kingfishers flash like jewels above the streams that gurgle down from the Sierra de la Macarena, an imposing outcrop of the Andes. Hawks hover above while parrots flit noisily by.

Colombia is to birds what Ascot is to hats; the number and variety are extraordinary, and many are photogenic. It has over 1,900 different species, more than any other country. At least 270 are endemic or near-endemic. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, an isolated, snowcapped massif rising sheer out of the Caribbean, is a particularly rich aviary. It is home to some 15 species, including a pygmy owl, a mountain tanager and a foliage gleaner, which are found nowhere else.

Few outsiders have enjoyed this avian paradise. Until recently, Colombia, geographically challenging and historically conflict-ridden, received little international tourism. This has started to change in the past decade. In 2016, 1.9m tourists visited, double the number of 2005. Tourism has become the second-biggest source of foreign exchange ($4.2bn last year), trailing oil but ahead of coffee, bananas and flowers.

That is still well behind Peru, for example. But Colombia has no single iconic attraction such as Machu Picchu. Instead, it offers natural beauty and ecological wealth: it has more varieties of orchid than anywhere else, too. However, many of the most diverse areas in the country have remained inaccessible for tourists because they suffered armed conflict involving the security forces, right-wing paramilitaries (who demobilised a decade ago) and the leftist guerrillas of the FARC.

Last year the FARC and the government of President Juan Manuel Santos signed a peace agreement. On June 27th, in a ceremony at Mesetas, not far from Vista Hermosa, the FARC marked the handover to UN monitors of their 7,132 personal weapons. Violence is not quite over: a couple of small leftist armed groups and some powerful criminal gangs remain. But the agreement with the FARC is a huge step. Last year Colombia’s rate fell to its lowest level in 40 years.

Tourism can potentially offer a fairly swift peace dividend. And that is where bird-watching offers an important business niche. A study published last year that surveyed more than 5,000 members of the Audubon Society, the biggest bird-conservation charity in the United States, found that many would be willing to pay more to visit Colombia than, for example, Costa Rica, an established destination for ecotourists. The authors’ conservative estimate was that bird tourism could generate revenue of $46m a year, and create at least 7,500 new jobs.

Some of this is starting to happen. Last year the northern Colombia birding trail opened, a joint effort involving Audubon, the United States Agency for International Development and Colombian NGOs. They trained local guides and businesses, catalogued the route and are promoting it. Colombia’s government has adopted a national bird-tourism strategy, which includes opening another four trails around the country. It is paying for bird hides and observation towers along the routes.

It will take co-ordination between public and private bodies and local organisations to put Colombia firmly on the birding map. Although some new eco-lodges have been built, environmentally friendly places to stay remain “few and far between”, says John Myers, one of the authors of the study. There is a shortage of specialist tour operators. And tourism must go hand in hand with conservation. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a Swiss-based body, reckons that the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is “the most irreplaceable site in the world for threatened species”.

Not all that long ago the FARC roamed the Sierra Nevada. Could some of its former fighters, now gathered in temporary camps, find new, peaceful livelihoods as birding guides or in conservation? Most are from rural families. Achieving this would require both an effort by the government and a change of attitude by the FARC. Each former fighter should get a parcel of land, Iván Márquez, one of the group’s leaders, told Semana, a newsmagazine, this week. That is a vision of peasant farming from the 1960s, when the FARC took up arms. Tourism and ecosystem services offer far more promising returns for the rural economy. Someone should tell Mr Márquez that twitchers bring riches.