The climate change phenomenon related to the progressive increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is one of the greatest concerns in this century, not only from an environmental point of view, but also as a problem with economic and social effects. Hence, the estimation of the GHG emissions (carbon footprint - CF) is an indicator for supporting carbon efficiency and promotes environmental responsibility, as a baseline for the establishment of mitigation strategies. In this work we performed the first CF estimation exercise in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL) Sede Manizales, year base 2019, covering three main scopes: direct emissions (fuel consumption of own vehicles, stationary sources and external vehicles), indirect emissions (electricity consumption) and other indirect emissions (disposal of ordinary and special-chemical wastes). For those scopes with detailed base information, the exercise implied the adjustment of emission factors to particular conditions of Manizales city; In addition, a computational code developed in R software allowed us to systematize the analysis procedure of baseline information, coupling a calculation module to estimate the CF in a range of years selected by the user, allowing the automatic generation of figures and numerical results. The results obtained suggest that 386.2 tons of CO2-eq was the total CF estimated in 2019. The use of electricity was the largest contributor with 49% of the total GHG emission, followed by the fuel consumption of own vehicles with 30%. In this specific scope, bus transportation for students, in vehicles which use diesel as fuel, contributed with 57% of GHG emissions. We compare results with other studies at a national and international level based on the estimation of a CF per capita index. The present exercise constitutes a fundamental baseline for the environmental management at UNAL Manizales, also allowing the possibility for applying the methodology and computational tools developed to estimate the CF in other universities in the region.