Salento and the Coffee Zone

They say that Salento is one of Colombia’s most popular tourist destinations, a small very green town in the hills of the Eje Cafetero, or the coffee zone in the hills in west central Colombia. It is full of tourists, especially French and German tourists, but also many Colombians.

The town exists to serve the tourist industry, the place is full of restaurants and knickknack shops, and the town square is full of jeeps, waiting to take the tourists to various destinations. They pile us into the backs of the jeeps, add two or three more passengers to stand on a specially designed back deck, and the jeep drives off, very back heavy. Some of the jeeps are ancient, but obviously very well cared for. The red one in the picture below was built in 1953, the proud driver told me.

Cocorra Valley hike

The major attraction and “iconic” Salento image is the Cocorra Valley, a beautiful area with national park status. The most common thing to do is to hike the valley, about a four hour hike where you climb through a cloud forest, crest a hill and then come down through a valley with tall tall wax palm trees. Despite its national park status, the trail passes through private farmlands where you have pay a fee. The hike through the cloud forest was quite wet and slippery in places, crossing back and forth on suspension bridges over a swift mountain stream.

I had already seen wax-palm valleys on my mountain bike tour, which were larger and more impressive, and not as full of tourists, so I was less impresses than many of my fellow hikers, but it was a nice way to spend a day.

Coffee tour

The other “must do” item on any Salento itinerary, is take a tour of a coffee plantation. Coffee is no longer Colombia’s most important industry, that’s been supplanted by another “c” crop. But coffee farm tours have become big business. Fincas have been set up with growing areas geared for tours rather than production, they demonstrate the coffee process, they offer tastings, and then they have cafes and bars and gift stores where you can spend additional money.

There are many visits to choose from, I wanted to visit the “best” tour, according to my research, but it wasn’t open on the day I wanted to go, so I settled for a mediocre one. It was fine, we actually strapped on wicker baskets and went off to pick coffee cherries, but there were very few ripe ones at this time of year. It was interesting to have the cultivation and the processing explained. We were told Colombian coffee is best enjoyed at the medium roast, that is when all the complexity of flavour is most evident, and we were given a special sample to taste at the end of the tour. I didn’t actually like the coffee nearly as much as the Colombian dark roast that I have been drinking for years, and so I was not inclined to purchase any of their special coffee from the gift shop.

And that’s that for Salento. Happy I came, but time to move on. One can only sit in the square and watch jeeps come and go for so long, then it’s time to do something else. On to Bogota.