The Zona Cafetera: Colombia's Coffee Landscape

The Zona Cafetera, or Eje Cafetero, is the coffee country of central Colombia: the departments of Caldas, Quindío and Risaralda, high in the Andes. It is a landscape shaped almost entirely by coffee, and in 2011 UNESCO inscribed part of it as a World Heritage site, the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia. Our Caldas coffees come from here.

A landscape made by coffee

What sets the region apart is how steep it is. Coffee grows on slopes too sharp for machines, so it is planted, tended and picked by hand, row after row up the mountainsides. Most of it is grown on small family farms rather than large estates, often alongside plantain and shade trees, which gives the hills their patchwork of greens.

UNESCO's description of the landscape rests on exactly this: a century of small-scale farming that adapted to difficult mountain terrain, and the way of life that grew up around it. The listing covers farming areas and towns across Caldas, Quindío, Risaralda and part of Valle del Cauca. Read UNESCO's description of the Coffee Cultural Landscape.

The towns

The region was largely settled in the nineteenth century by families moving south from Antioquia, who cleared the forest and planted coffee. They built towns on ridges and hilltops, around a central square and a church, and many of the older houses still stand: built in bahareque, a frame of wood and bamboo filled with earth, with wide wooden balconies and doors and windows painted in strong colors.

In these towns, the coffee year sets the rhythm. The harvest brings pickers to the farms, and the town squares and cafés fill when the work is done.

The jeeps

On roads too narrow and steep for trucks, the region's working vehicle is the jeep, many of them decades old. Locally called yipaos, they carry sacks of coffee down the mountains, along with plantains, furniture and the people who work the farms, loaded far beyond what seems possible. Some towns hold parades in their honor.

Where our coffees come in

Kukuwu sources in Caldas, one of the three departments at the heart of the Zona Cafetera. Two of our coffees come from Chinchiná, a coffee town near Manizales: the Chinchiná Harmony Roast and Caldas Serenity Now. Caldas Geisha Harmony grows around Villamaría and Risaralda, two Caldas towns, and Tropical Dulce Dream is from Caldas too.

To read more about the department itself, see coffee from Caldas. And for how a coffee carries its place into the cup, read what single-origin means.