El Tiempo

What is El Tiempo?

El Tiempo is a Bogotá daily newspaper and news site published by Casa Editorial El Tiempo. The paper dates its first edition to 30 January 1911, when Alfonso Villegas Restrepo, then twenty-seven, printed four pages in a run of 300 copies sold at three centavos each from two rooms facing the Parque Santander.^[1]

The Media Ownership Monitor's Colombia study records that in April 2012 the buyer acquired 88.37 per cent of the stock after purchasing Grupo Planeta's 55 per cent holding, and consolidated 100 per cent the following month; it names that buyer as Grupo Aval.^[2] Portafolio reported on 30 May 2012 that the Organización Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo (Olcsa), which had held 33 per cent, bought out the Espinosa family and the heirs of Hernando Santos Castillo to reach full ownership.^[3] The year Grupo Planeta first bought into the publisher could not be established from the sources retrieved.

Sport is one of the paper's standing desks, published online under Deportes.^[4]

What does El Tiempo cover?

The Deportes desk is divided into fútbol colombiano, fútbol internacional, ciclismo, tenis, automovilismo and a Ciclo Olímpico section.^[4] Domestic football reporting follows the Liga BetPlay clubs and the national team; the international section carries Copa Libertadores and European club football.

The cycling section runs through the Grand Tour calendar and through the Colombian domestic season: on 17 July 2026 it published the full route of the Clásico RCN, reporting a 66th edition of 1,272 kilometres over nine stages, scheduled from 19 to 27 September 2026 between Mosquera in Cundinamarca and a time trial finish at the Alto de Las Palmas above Medellín.^[5]

The desk also carries a Ciclo Olímpico section, which is where athletics, weightlifting and boxing results appear between Games, and a tennis and motorsport pair of sections.^[4] The paper belongs to the Grupo de Diarios de América, the regional newspaper association it joined in 1992, and its investigative unit, set up in the 1970s, is described in its own 110-year account as the first in a Latin American newspaper.^[1]

What are El Tiempo's reach and standing?

The Media Ownership Monitor's Colombia study describes eltiempo.com as the most visited media site in the country and places it first on the audience measure it uses, recording annual revenue of roughly USD 177 million for the publisher.^[2] Those figures belong to the study's measurement period in the middle of the 2010s, and no more recent independently published audience figure for the site could be retrieved for this page.

The same study describes El Tiempo as one of two newspapers with national circulation in Colombia, the other being El Espectador's daily edition, and notes that for the seven years in which El Espectador appeared weekly, El Tiempo was the country's only paid general daily.^[2] [6]

Since when has El Tiempo published?

The paper's own 110-year retrospective, published on 29 January 2021, sets out the sequence: founded 1911 by Villegas Restrepo; sold in 1913 to Eduardo Santos Montejo for 5,000 pesos; directed from 1939 to 1981 by Roberto García-Peña; offices destroyed in partisan violence in 1952; closed by the government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1955, after which it circulated under the title Intermedio; and an investigative unit set up in the 1970s under Daniel Samper Pizano.^[1]

That account dates the newspaper but not its sports desk, and no primary source dating the first Deportes section separately could be retrieved. Three dates are distinct and are kept apart here: the 1911 founding, the April 2012 purchase of the Grupo Planeta stake that took the Sarmiento organisation to about 88 per cent, and the May 2012 agreement with the minority holders that consolidated full ownership.^[2] [3]

Why does El Tiempo matter in Colombian sport?

Colombian sports coverage is concentrated in a small number of owners. Valorem S.A., the Santo Domingo family holding company, lists Caracol Televisión and El Espectador in the same portfolio; Blu Radio is published by Caracol Televisión S.A., which in turn operates the Gol Caracol football brand.^[7] The Organización Ardila Lülle owns RCN Televisión, which La República reported on 30 November 2015 held 50 per cent of the subscription channel Win Sports.^[8]

El Tiempo sits outside both groups, under the Sarmiento Angulo organisation.^[2] [3] For anyone counting independent Colombian sources on a single athlete or result, that distinction is the whole point: coverage in El Tiempo and in two Valorem titles is coverage by two owners, not three.

The Media Ownership Monitor's study records El Tiempo and El Espectador as the only two Colombian newspapers circulating nationally, and the two sit in different ownership chains.^[2] [6] The paper's daily cycling reporting, running from the Grand Tour calendar to the route of the domestic Clásico RCN, also gives it a standing position in the sport that carries Colombian athletes furthest internationally.^[5]