As I wrote yesterday, Salento is in the middle of Colombia's Zona Cafetera - which was declared a world heritage site by the UNESCO, by the way. So today, I decided to visit two of the coffee-growing fincas close to Salento.
Walking there took about an hour, but it was pure pleasure to walk in this lush tropical landscape with surprising views opening up from time to time - such as this wonderful view of the valley where Río Quindío flows:
After a while, I arrived at the finca of Don Elias. And this is Don Elias:
Doesn't he just look like the prototypical Colombian coffee farmer? I couldn't believe it myself ;-)
Don Elias' finca is rather small: he said he has 8000 coffee plants that yield about 12 tons of coffee per year. Everything on his finca is done manually, without elaborate machinery and without chemicals. To keep the farm healthy, and to produce natural fertilizer, there are bananas, plantains, avocados and a few other plants mixed with the coffee plants. Among them, I saw - for the first time in my life, I believe - a pineapple plant! Surprisingly (for me), pineapples don't grow on trees, but rather very close to the ground, on plants that look slightly similar to agaves.
Wonderful red flowers like these were also scattered between the coffee plants:
The main plant on the farm was, of course, coffee. On the coffee branch in the next picture, you can see a few white flowers. The flowers bloom only for a few days, and after that they fall down, revealing a tiny green seed on the branch where the flower used to be.
The seeds then grow until they reach their final size, and ripen until they have a nice red color (or yellow, depending on the plant).
The seeds don't all ripen at the same time, so the harvest has to be done manually over a period of time. After the harvest, the beans are separated from the peel, washed and dried. When they are dry, another shell is separated from the beans, which are then roasted and ground.
After Don Elias showed me the entire process, his wife prepared the ground coffee in a typical Colombian coffee machine:
The coffee was excellent, very soft without any bitterness that is so often found in coffee.
Don Elias sells the roasted and ground coffee only locally on his finca, to visitors who take his tour. The majority of his coffee, however, is only dried and then sold to the coffee collective for export (coffee roasting companies abroad want to roast their coffee themselves, so they only buy dried, non-roasted coffee).
After drinking coffee and chatting with Don Elias, I said goodbye and went to a neighboring finca, El Ocaso. With about 52000 coffee plants, they were much bigger, needing sixteen permanent employees to take care of the finca. Another difference between the two farms was that El Ocaso relies heavily on machinery to process the coffee after the harvest, leading to a much less human impression overall. Having seen El Ocaso, I'm really happy that there are people like Don Elias!
Walking there took about an hour, but it was pure pleasure to walk in this lush tropical landscape with surprising views opening up from time to time - such as this wonderful view of the valley where Río Quindío flows:
After a while, I arrived at the finca of Don Elias. And this is Don Elias:
Doesn't he just look like the prototypical Colombian coffee farmer? I couldn't believe it myself ;-)
Don Elias' finca is rather small: he said he has 8000 coffee plants that yield about 12 tons of coffee per year. Everything on his finca is done manually, without elaborate machinery and without chemicals. To keep the farm healthy, and to produce natural fertilizer, there are bananas, plantains, avocados and a few other plants mixed with the coffee plants. Among them, I saw - for the first time in my life, I believe - a pineapple plant! Surprisingly (for me), pineapples don't grow on trees, but rather very close to the ground, on plants that look slightly similar to agaves.
Wonderful red flowers like these were also scattered between the coffee plants:
The main plant on the farm was, of course, coffee. On the coffee branch in the next picture, you can see a few white flowers. The flowers bloom only for a few days, and after that they fall down, revealing a tiny green seed on the branch where the flower used to be.
The seeds then grow until they reach their final size, and ripen until they have a nice red color (or yellow, depending on the plant).
The seeds don't all ripen at the same time, so the harvest has to be done manually over a period of time. After the harvest, the beans are separated from the peel, washed and dried. When they are dry, another shell is separated from the beans, which are then roasted and ground.
After Don Elias showed me the entire process, his wife prepared the ground coffee in a typical Colombian coffee machine:
The coffee was excellent, very soft without any bitterness that is so often found in coffee.
Don Elias sells the roasted and ground coffee only locally on his finca, to visitors who take his tour. The majority of his coffee, however, is only dried and then sold to the coffee collective for export (coffee roasting companies abroad want to roast their coffee themselves, so they only buy dried, non-roasted coffee).
After drinking coffee and chatting with Don Elias, I said goodbye and went to a neighboring finca, El Ocaso. With about 52000 coffee plants, they were much bigger, needing sixteen permanent employees to take care of the finca. Another difference between the two farms was that El Ocaso relies heavily on machinery to process the coffee after the harvest, leading to a much less human impression overall. Having seen El Ocaso, I'm really happy that there are people like Don Elias!
