For great many years, coffee was one of the main export products of Colombia. The slopes of our mountain ranges were colonized for its cultivation. Just like the famous Juan Valdez, the peasants of the area developed the best techniques for the cultivation, picking, and processing of the beans while establishing their own economy and culture. They have preserved the life styles and traditions of the first colonizers who came from the Department of Antioquia, whose chief values were family, religion, keeping one’s word, and a love for the land.

Banana and other trees shade the coffee bushes, where the chapoleras (local name for female coffee pickers) gather the beans, which are then dried in the open air and transported by mule or old Willys Jeeps to collection centers.

Dense forests of guadua (a neotropics genus of a thorny clumping bamboo) and bamboo intermingle with the coffee bushes on the slopes and coffee haciendas preserve their original architecture characterized by wide corridors and flower-filled balconies whose brilliant colors stand out among the rest of the exuberant vegetation.