By using census data from 1835 to 2005 this paper studies the urban hierarchy in Colombia and its regions. This document focuses on three issues: 1. the city size distribution by means of Zipf's law and Gibrat's law; 2. the shifts in the population growth models; 3. the empirical validation of the coincidence between national and regional population patterns. Using the adjusted rank-size relationship and non-parametric techniques, we find that city size distributions follow the Zipfian power low and that Gibrat's law holds at national level and partially at the regional level from 1964. These results are consistent with shifts in the population growth from mid 1950s at national and regional level.
