To unveil the long-term dynamics of peri-urban high Andean forest cover, and provide valuable information on historical vegetation changes in a highly dynamic landscape, we gathered and analyzed aerial imagery spanning the years 1940 to 2007 from nine administrative localities in the Eastern Andean Cordillera of Colombia. The aerial images were obtained from the Colombian Geographical Institute Agustín Codazzi (IGAC) where they were scanned in high resolution. Subsequently the images were georeferenced in two consecutive steps using QGIS 2.18, using the thin plate spline as a transformation method for data interpolation, since it led to the highest precision among all the methods tested (first and second order polynomials).