Nohra was born in Medellín, Antioquia on 29 May 1955 to Eduardo Puyana Rodríguez and Alicia Bickenbach Plata. Nohra, the eldest of four children has two brothers, Eduardo and David, and one sister Laura. At a young age the family moved to Bogotá, and she attended the New Granada School where she finished her primary education and then attended the Marymount School where she finished her secondary education, and afterwards travel to France where she studied journalism at the École Française des Attachés de Presse in Paris. After college, Puyana worked for the French magazine Elle, for Christian Dior, and for the UNESCOPress Corps. In 1978 back in Colombia, she met Andrés Pastrana Arango, a lawyer and then Director of Guión magazine, and the son of former President of Colombia Misael Pastrana Borrero and his wife and former First LadyMaría Cristina Arango Vega; they were introduced at a corrida de toros in Cartagena de Indias by Juan Manuel Santos Calderón, a mutual friend of the Puyanas and the Pastranas. They met again later that year at a new year's party and they started dating shortly after. They were married in a Roman Catholic ceremony on 20 March 1981 at the Church of Saint Peter Claver in Cartagena. Together they have three children: Santiago, Laura, and Valentina. Living through Colombian armed conflict, Puyana had to endure the tragedy that beset her family during the wave of kidnappings in Colombia during the late 1980s, the whole of the 1990s, and early 2000s. Her husband, the then Bogotá Mayoral candidate Andrés Pastrana Arango, was kidnapped on 18 January 1988 in Antioquia by the Medellín Cartel in an effort to put pressure on the Government into preventing the extradition of Pablo Escobar and other drug lords to the United States; he was finally released a week later. On 9 April 1991, her father, Eduardo Puyana Rodríguez of 62 years of age, was kidnapped when he was driving his car in Bogotá; his body was found on 2 April 1993 buried on a farm in the outskirts of the town of Victoria, Caldas, he had been killed for over a year, shot in the head by his captors. On 27 December 2002, her maternal uncle the businessman, Helmut Bickenbach Plata of 69, and his wife the former Miss Colombia, Doris Inés Gil Santamaría of 63, were kidnapped from their home in Nocaima by the FARC and held captive for ransom; they were killed at point-blank range by the guerrillas on 23 June 2003 during a confrontation with Colombian Army.
