Holiday in Colombia (5): Coffee Region

Today we left the capital Bogotá and flew west to the city of Pereira  – a flight of only 30 minutes – where we were met by our second local guide, a young man called Christian who illustrated his provision of information with an iPad. The local company for which he works is called Living Trips which is a good sign and certainly better than the alternative. The weather here is warmer than we have experienced so far at the higher altitudes. 

We drove outside the city to our accommodation for the next couple of nights. The Hacienda San Jose was built in 1888 and it is one if the oldest and best-preserved houses in the coffee region around Pereira. It has only eight bedrooms but a decent outdoor restaurant plus an open-air swimming pool. 

After a quick lunch at the hotel, we drove almost two hours south-west to visit the coffee plantation of Hacienda San Alberto- my second time on a coffee plantation (the other one was in Costa Rica). The Zona Cafeteria (Coffee Region) is really atmospheric with rolling, verdant green hills and mist-covered mountains. 

Like all coffee plantations in Colombia, San Alberto only grows arabica coffee and, first climbing the hillside and then sitting in a small cafe, a guide explaining the process of years in creating the bushes, the arrangements of months in growing and picking the beans, the procedures of days to strip and dry the beans, and three techniques of minutes to create different-tasting coffee. We were told that the coffee trees are sometimes attacked by a fungus with what seemed to be the name Roger but turned out to be ‘roya’.

A little way down the mountain in which the plantation sits is the small town of Buenavista and we stopped for a short while to view this delightful place where almost every home and shop has pastel-coloured walls and brightly-coloured windows and doors. Then it was another journey almost two hours back to our hotel for dinner together.  


 




XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>