Getting around CLO
Alfonso Bonilla Aragón does not sit inside Cali — it is built in Palmira, a separate municipality in Valle del Cauca. Its operator changed underneath it in 2025: Aerocali S.A. ran the concession for 25 years, that contract expired on 31 August 2025, and since 1 September 2025 the airport has been run directly by Aeronáutica Civil (Aerocivil), Colombia’s civil aviation authority, while a new concession is arranged. Aerocivil’s own handover announcement put numbers on the transition: 122 mission-critical staff kept in place (58 air traffic controllers and 45 aeronautical firefighters), a public-operation budget of COP 44.908 billion for the first six to eight months, rising to as much as COP 90 billion should direct administration run the full eleven months the transition allows. Aerocivil, which runs more than 70 airports and aerodromes nationwide, calls the airport “the gateway of southwestern Colombia to the world,” and named it the pilot site for a satellite-navigation (PBN) cooperation with Avianca and Airbus, announced ahead of its formal signing. The interim period has drawn criticism: Valle del Cauca business guilds went public in early 2026 with concerns over runway and taxiway wear and parking-service problems, and pressed for a binding timetable; Aerocivil answered that it had already spent more than COP 13.4 billion on maintenance since the handover, with tens of billions more budgeted through the rest of 2026. A competitively tendered replacement concession, under a scheme regional officials call “Aeropuertos del Suroccidente,” is moving through Aerocivil and ANI’s own timetable; as of mid-2026 the Valle del Cauca governor put the likely award date at December 2026, with a stated investment plan of COP 4.3 trillion. Business guilds and travel sites alike commonly describe the airport as Colombia’s third-busiest, after Bogotá and Medellín, and press citing a guild statement put 2025 traffic at close to 6.9 million passengers — though neither figure comes from a dated, primary Aerocivil release, so neither is treated here as an official count.
