When someone asks us what the tour includes, we answer with a list: transport, lunch, a guide, a tasting. It’s an honest answer, and it’s a poor one.
What the tour includes is these people. And to understand why, you have to start at the beginning.
It didn’t start on a farm
Experiencia Cafetera didn’t start in the countryside. It started in a notebook, in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, in 2013. Juan David —from Bogotá, far from home— wrote down the first idea there: to return to Colombia and learn coffee from the root, from seed to cup, far from the supermarket shelves that offer the worst of our own product.
The idea became an operation in Buenavista, and from there it spread across the Coffee Region. But the purpose never changed, and it’s worth saying it in the words of that time: to work with those who work the land, to help them add value to what they produce, and to connect the person who grows the coffee with the person who drinks it. Between those two there are too many people charging a toll. All we do is shorten that distance.
That’s why we say that, for us, coffee is an excuse to talk. The rest —the Jeep, the lunch, the tasting— is logistics. This is the people.
Doña Ligia — El Patio
We met Doña Ligia the way all of Pijao knows her: healing. For decades she has been easing the town’s people with what she knows about plants. “I always healed with love,” she says. “Many people, 20, 25, 30 years ago, got better thanks to the knowledge one had.”
She tells the day their paths crossed like this: “I met Juan David on an ordinary day in the park, when he brought some tourists to town. I was going through a difficult time, full of distress, and I felt that my dear God put him in my path. I spoke to him, told him what I knew about plants, and he listened attentively.” Since then El Patio —her nursery of medicinal plants— is where our operations begin. For her it isn’t a physical place: it’s “a corner of healing for the soul.”
She walks with you among the plants, telling you what each one is for. It’s not a rehearsed talk: it’s what she knows, and she says it better than anyone: “The ‘weeds’ are good herbs. If we learn to make use of them, they give us benefits.” There’s a story she likes to tell, and it says everything: one day, in the park, a boy shouted at her: “Doña Ligia! My little sister got better with the tea you taught me!” “That,” she says, “is priceless.”
When you ask her why she does what she does, she answers with a line you could put at the entrance to the town: “To sow is not just to plant a seed in the ground. It’s to plant a hope for the future.”
Don Leo — Villa Gloria Farm
Don Leo grows his coffee, processes it, packs it and sells it himself, under his own brand. Put that way, it sounds like a startup. In his case it’s something more stubborn: it’s an entire family held up by a single bean.
At Villa Gloria he and his family work. His daughter Betty walks an hour and a half, twice a week, to get to her class on coffee processing; her hands support a whole family and several workers. Among guamo trees, plantains and fruit trees they harvest the coffee that Don Leo turns into honey, into natural, into something of his own.
When you sit at his table and he serves you, you’re not tasting a product. A guest who stayed with him put it in writing better than we could: drinking Don Leo’s coffee, he said, brought him back to what matters — “passion, authenticity, commitment and love.”
Doña Orfilia — Café La Floresta
Doña Orfilia founded Café La Floresta and for some fifteen years has been doing something that in the Colombian countryside is hard and uncommon: not just selling the bean, but keeping the part of the chain where the value is —from the tree to her own cup—.
On her farm you sit at a station that is yours alone and taste, one after another, the varieties she herself planted and processed. It’s not a catalog tasting: it’s the coffee of a woman who decided to see her own work all the way through, served by her hands. It is, in miniature, exactly what we came to do.
The stand in the square
In Pijao’s square there’s a stand where you buy the bag of coffee directly from the person who grew it. No collector, no middleman, no supermarket aisle. A two-second gesture that says it all.
Pablito and the Willys
The Jeep Willys that climbs up to the farms isn’t a photo-op attraction. In Pijao the Willys still works.
The person who best embodies that tradition is Pablo Teleche, “Pablito.” He comes from a line of muleteers —his grandfather drove oxen, his father passed down the wisdom of the road—. About twelve years ago, with four million pesos and not knowing how to drive, he bought his first Willys and set off on the rough trail of Los Juanes de Buenavista to learn his trade: willysero —a Willys driver—.
Even today you’ll see him climb up to the farms with the engine at full throttle and the dust rising behind him, loaded with people, with sacks and with market goods —like his father, like his grandfather before him—. In Pijao the Willys isn’t decoration: it’s work.
Why we’re telling you this before you come
Because we want you to know what you’re coming for.
You’re not coming to watch a production process. You’re coming to sit at the same table as the people who live from this: the one who heals with plants, the one who walks an hour and a half to learn about her own coffee, the one who drives the Willys along the trail. That’s the whole tour, and the rest is logistics.
And that’s why we say a cup of coffee is never the same again. It’s not a brochure line: it’s what happens when coffee stops being a drink and becomes the name of someone.
