The Museo del Río Magdalena is housed in a restored colonial building near the riverfront, and it tells the story of the great river and Honda's role in it with more depth than you might expect for a small-town museum. The displays cover the indigenous peoples who fished the river long before the Spanish arrived, the colonial trading economy, the era of steam navigation in the nineteenth century, and the ecological changes the river has undergone in recent decades.
The most interesting section deals with the bogas — the working boatmen who poled and paddled cargo up and down the Magdalena for centuries under punishing conditions. European travellers who wrote about the river in the 1800s were consistently amazed and horrified by the bogas' labour: working near-naked in tropical heat, carrying impossible loads, singing to keep rhythm. The museum gives them more credit than most history does. If you only visit one museum in Honda, make it this one — it explains why the town exists at all.