The site sits at an elevation of approximately 2,577 meters above sea level.

The Bogotá Altiplano is high country by any global standard — this is the terrain of the Eastern Andes, elevated well above the warm lowlands to the east and west, exposed to the temperature extremes and thin air that characterize Andean highland environments.

The people who lived here in the Preceramic period were adapted to altitude in ways that their lowland contemporaries elsewhere in the Americas were not.

The first significant excavations at Checua were conducted in 1992 under the direction of archaeologist Ana María Groot.