Perceptive Travel

Looking for Home in a Coffee Growing Paradise in Colombia
Story by Julia Hubbel

A lifetime wanderer looking to escape the USA for a more laid-back life heads to an area where caffeinated beans mix with slow small-town life, in the main coffee region of Colombia.

From the small rooftop garden on the top of La Estancia hotel in Salamina, Colombia, the view is breathtaking in all directions. The 200-year-old roof tiles stretch out towards the foggy, distant mountains, and multi-colored birds perch and preen on them. The light breezes touch your face. It's a magical place, which is why La Estancia installed three hammocks and a telescope for people who head up the stairs and really don't want to come back down.

It was so lovely there, the town so inviting, that I canceled another reservation to stay a few extra days.

A wander around pueblos like Salamina with a guide is a must, especially if you're not proficient in Spanish. Here in this region of Colombia, English speakers aren't common. The country is still recovering from years of civil wars and drug trade, and its unfortunate reputation has made tourism a slow slog outside of a few choice spots like Cartagena. For those willing to explore despite back-of-the-mind fears of harm (unlikely these days), the benefits are considerable.

Spending nearly three weeks in some of the world's finest coffee growing country was a revelation. The region is high, cool but still tropical. The climate ranges from a high of perhaps 85 F in flatter Viterbo, one of the villages in the region, to a cooler 65 F in places like Salamina. Rain is steady, and while climate change is changing some of the rainfall patterns, there is still plenty to support all the coffee, banana, citrus and sugar cane crops.

The pandemic had finally been peeled back enough for me to venture out, and I was way overdue for a trip to South America. As a lover of horse cultures, Latin American music and Spanish, at which I am not proficient, Colombia's high coffee country was deeply appealing. I was eager to bypass her big cities and see what the Andean high country had to offer, if not for retirement, then at least for frequent visits.

An ulterior motive is to potentially see if this area is where I may wish to live someday. Would it be a city, close to a city in a neighborhood? Or a smaller pueblo, farther afield? With those priorities in mind, I set off for Coffee Central, Colombia.

Life Moves Slowly, Despite the Stimulants

The Coffee Axis is just under 350,000 acres of some of the riches volcanic soil on earth. The combination of high altitude, proximity to the equator and plenty of rains combine to create a near-perfect region for many crops, but the queen is coffee.

Sometimes called the Coffee Triangle in the tourism world and the Coffee Cultural Landscape by the UNESCO World Heritage body, it's a spread-out area with scattered hotels and tourism lodges, a coffee theme park even. Most of it is rural, however, with agriculture leading the economy.

Once you leave the bustle of Bogota or one of the energetic coastal cities currently enjoying hot expat status, life pauses, but that doesn't mean the excitement stops.

Just getting to a place like Salamina is an adventure. From the West Coast of the USA where I began my journey, it was a red-eye to arrive in Costa Rica, then to Bogota. I was continuing to Manizales, a city of half a million sitting at just over 7,000 feet. While Manizales has an airport, the weather often shuts it down. I passed on taking a bus from Bogota to Manizales, It takes eight hours, as long as the roads aren't blocked by a landslide or accident.

So I flew a commuter airline into Pereira, one of the three main cities of the Coffee Axis. Pereira is just under 5,000 feet and about ten degrees hotter. Its population is just under half a million. The third city making up the triad is Armenia, the smallest of the three at 300,000 people and at an altitude of 5000.

Manizales is spread across a labyrinth of hills and valleys, with its neighborhoods nestled in the creases formed by the hills. The city of Manizales leaps into view as you bus in from Pereira, an almost otherworldly horizon of skyscrapers hovering above the clouds and surrounded on all sides by green mountains and fincas (farms) spilling down the mountainsides.

Life is slower here in part because of the perpetual springlike weather, everyone mingling outdoors. Another reason is that traveling from place to place takes more time, largely because in this mountainous area, there aren't a lot of flat areas for highways. Transportation, with the exception of sometimes-delayed planes, often involves hours of twisting, turning roads.

For me that was part of the pleasure. The views, like the wonderful coffee, are not to be hurried.

Living like a Colombian

For me, the best way to get the answer to whether or not living in Colombia was a good idea was to live like a Colombian for a while. I had been paired with a couple who had two adult kids. They lived in a bamboo house, which is common as bamboo is indigenous to Colombia, in what is considered a rural area but well inside the city limits of Manizales. Their small plot is considered a finca, although it's just a few acres.

They are not ordinary acres. Dense forests full of birds and crickets are also filled with the sounds of tree frogs when it rains. Birds flit everywhere, and the rains ensure a special kind of lushness. While you can hear the sounds of traffic in the distance, the dense bush blocks out most of it and you feel as though you're deep in the countryside, with the flora touching every window.

Piedad is an actress; her partner Alejandro was in the Colombian military. My days with them alternated between scenic drives in the city to visit the various neighborhoods to slow days at home, punctuated by the pleasant sound and smells of Alejandro's cooking.

People here take time to make a meal, which is another way the world slows down. Piedad and I would sit and talk (or I would stumble through my Spanish) or I'd play with one of the battle-scarred dogs which protected the property. Alejandro cut and sliced and washed and prepped while singing along to lively music.

Here you can buy empanadas on the street for mere pennies if you're in a hurry, but true Colombian life is much slower. Above all, one stops for coffee, easily five or six times a day. Any excuse to stop for coffee is a perfect excuse. The best part about this, at least during my travels, is that people really did talk to each other, as opposed to simply taking up opposite chairs and ignore each other while on their phones.

Perhaps one of the best signs I have seen in a long time, placed on the wall of one of the original coffee houses in Salamina, reads, "No tenemos wifi, hablen entre ustedes. ("We don't have wifi. Talk to each other.")

Clean, High and Dignified

From Piedad's home, it was a short drive into the city. One of the first impressions of Manizales proper is the clean sidewalks. Armies of uniformed workers spend hours picking up garbage to keep the sidewalks pristine. At this altitude, the air is thin, and on certain days it can be filled with ash from one of the active volcanoes which dot the Colombian Andes. Colombia is part of the Ring of Fire, with fifteen active volcanoes, at least one of them usually rumbling enough to cause concern.

Manizales has all the amenities, including an excellent, world-class hospital and plenty of universities. Downtown is lively and hopping, replete with one side street lined with nine tango bars. Apparently the locals were smitten with tango movies out of Argentina in the early days of the cinema and took to it bigtime. Now there's an annual tango festival each November.

The bars are open most of the day, each one appealing to a certain kind of tango lover, from the extreme aficionado to the casual dancer. From midday to midnight, people dance, drink coffee, talk, and dance again, while old men sit at the tables and sing along to the tunes with gusto. As the sun sets, coffee turns into rum, and then the dancing gets serious. It is, after all, South America.

Slow life informed restaurant meals as well. Americans, long accustomed to instant gratification, have to gear down to appreciate the time that a good restaurant takes to prepare a meal. I learned to engage people sitting near me, practice my terrible Spanish or retreat, humbled, to Google Translate, and have plenty of laughs before the food arrived.

My guide escorted me from one coffee shop to another, ranging from fine, well-manicured neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city proper to the exquisite coffee shops perched on top of apartment buildings. Those were the best, offering vistas stretching for miles into the surrounding valleys.

Cheap, but Hair-raising Journeys

There are plenty of ways to get around from the cities to the villages in Colombia's coffee region. Taxis to pueblos about an hour distant, which you can share with others, can range from about 20 dollars if you go solo to 5 if you share with 3 other people. The open Jeep was my favorite, which meant that my guide and I were crammed in variously with groups of women heading to market nearby or mothers with kids, all of whom were shoved in willy-nilly in the Willy. We slid hard back and forth as the driver hurtled around the hairpin turns.

Buses run everywhere. Only some 324 out of every 1000 people owns or has access to a car in Colombia, so public transportation is excellent. While the diesel fumes aren't, people from just about any municipality, any distant neighborhood can get from point A to point B for every little.

Our open Jeep felt like a four-wheel drive adventure, with several riders hanging precariously off the back end, grasping with fingers and toes as we rounded the sharp corners.

I visited several pueblos: Salamina, a touristy spot of great beauty; Aranzazu, a lively town with a wonderful church and a huge cadre of horses to ride and Risaralda, a town perched on a ridge and considered by many to be the heart of the Coffee Cultural Landscape, which was inscribed in the World Heritage Sites in 2011. Finally, Viterbo, where sugar cane is the primary crop, and music is one of its unique reasons for being.

Three of the pueblos are perched on mountaintops; Viterbo, some 10-15 degrees hotter than the three main cities, lay on the flat.

Pueblo Life: Horses, Views, History, and More Coffee

Having had a small taste of big city life, a world dominated by majestic statues of Simon Bolivar, great libraries and a well-educated population, I wanted to explore what life might be like an hour or two out of town.

The typical pueblo is dominated by a tall church, invariably Catholic, its bell tower visible for miles. The church centers the public square, often populated by tall, graceful trees. The town's best homes face the square, with the street level populated with restaurants, stores and, of course, coffee shops.

Salamina, in particular, caught my heart for its well-tended streets punctuated by brilliantly-painted doors and windows. Rents in this part of the world are low, and food is very inexpensive. As in the city, all the produce is locally-grown and close-in slaughterhouses ensure a steady supply of fresh meat.

The pueblo's streets, as were all of them I visited but for Viterbo, are extremely steep. The town is situated on a hilltop at just under 6,000 feet, and the high, cool air is brisk and early springlike. Salamina was declared a "national monument and historic heritage of mankind," a title the locals take seriously. Where I wandered the streets were clean, and as with all the pueblos and in the cities, the stray dogs are well-fed, petted and properly cared-for.

Aranzazu's two gifts were its energetic padre, Ramia Vasquez-Fundamar and the horse rides up winding hills to a local finca. Fundamar also owns some of the horses we rode, as he has a finger in just about everything. He runs a home for the elderly, rents out equipment for parties, and finds multiple ways to fund his many charity projects.

My guide had lined me up for a four-hour ride. Having easy access to horses is one of the primary requirements I have of the countries I visit, and where I might retire. The fine criollo horses we rode, a South American breed known for its sure feet and strength in the mountains, carried us past the spreading farms, the endless barking dogs and carpets of flowers, up into the high clouds where the farms were nestled.

When we reached the finca which was our final stop, we had locally-made fresh cheese. And, of course, coffee. A few days later the tiny town would host some two hundred riders up that same road, which would end in a rowdy party full of rum and music.

The road to Risaralda, which I took by bus, was lined with crude crosses. This part of Colombia is unstable, not just because of the volcanoes, but because so many buildings are built into the steep inclines of the hills. Heavy rains send banana palms, coffee trees, homes, horses and a lot more careening down the slopes every year. The open red gashes in the green fabric of the hills are visible for miles. The crosses along the winding roads mark where campesinos lost their lives while harvesting.

The most marked aspect of Risaralda were the streets which angled down sharply off the main road. It is the closest major pueblo to some of the newer condominium outcroppings which are being built for the expat communities and rich city folks who have second homes. The condos are actually free-standing homes, which look identical to any San Diego neighborhood, complete with private hot tubs.

The Ghosts Still Live Here

Colombia's pockmarked drug history and guerilla revolution still inform many relationships here, with some of the pueblos plagued with a years of killings or gang activity. The main actor in the long running wars that cost so many Colombians their lives was FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which ended its bloody war against the government in 2016. Long before, however, there were brutal killings and dispatches of enemies in the pueblos, where their ghosts are said to still reside in the walls and halls of the old homes.

In one small pueblo, Viterbo, the Colombian mafia and narcos reigned supreme until, as the story goes, one man decided to use music to reopen the doors to civility in his small town.

Nelson Lopez created "Cameloc," a small home on a street corner near the square, where he invited poets and musicians from all over the country. The tale is that his work to create a musical haven resulted in causing the gangs to stop keeping outsiders walled out with rifles, and reuniting Viterbo with the rest of the country.

When I visited Nelson, he serenaded me with a rendition from Verdi's Rigoletto. The bricks of his home and the concrete of the surrounding sidewalk are inscribed with the names of the hundreds of artists whose work helped heal a town.

People believe that the dead inhabit the homes and land. There are many, given Colombia's history. Even today, the most rural areas of Colombia—especially parts of the jungle—are still deemed too dangerous for most, so the majority of people inhabit the cities and pueblos.

Anyone choosing to travel or live in the Coffee Axis sees the other side though: the springlike weather, the gorgeous views, and the low cost of living. Colombia is full of gaudy gorgeous life, and its history is also full of gaudy, gorgeous death. The two live side-by-side in this complex country, where the extraordinary warmth of its citizens is still informed by terrible loss, in a country still forming, still making sense of itself in a changing world.

That said, the Coffee Axis passed the test for my own piece of heaven, a perpetual spring with plenty of time for a fresh brew and a good conversation.

Julia Hubbel is the author of two books, a prize-winning journalist, and adventure athlete. Her primary interest is in adventure sports in the farthest reaches of the world, learning about indigenous cultures and discovering the last of the world's pristine places.

Related Features:
Complicated Crime and Punishment in Colombia by Tom Coote
Alert in the Americas: Inside the Farms Growing Our Coffee by Tim Leffel
Tranquilandia Transformed in Colombia by Richard McColl
"Progress" in Colorado: A Visit and a Goodbye to a Rapidly Changing Place by Julia Hubbel


See other South America travel stories in the archives