You’re going to Salento. That’s fine. We’ll take you there too.
Salento is beautiful, and the fame is earned: Calle Real, the wax palms of the Valle de Cocora — the national tree, the tallest in the world — the color everywhere. We’re not going to tell you to skip it, or pretend we’ve discovered something everyone doesn’t already know. What we can tell you is that by mid-morning, Cocora has a line: buses, people waiting their turn for the photo, trails where you’re never alone. The palm is imposing; the silence is scarce.
And that an hour and a half or so from there — crossing Armenia toward the south of Quindío — there’s another town. And another forest of those very same palms where, on almost any given day, you can be the only one looking at them.
The Same Palms, Without the Crowd
The wax palm — Ceroxylon quindiuense, Colombia’s national tree — doesn’t grow only in Cocora. Up on the mountains of Pijao, at 2,400 meters, there’s a sanctuary of centuries-old palms in a little-traveled high-Andean forest, a refuge for the yellow-eared parrot, a threatened species.
That’s where our Wax Palms Expedition climbs, the flagship tour of Experiencia Cafetera. And the difference with Cocora isn’t the tree — it’s the same one — but the company: here, on an ordinary day, visitors tend to be the only “tourists” in the place. Palms that disappear upward, the same feeling of standing beneath something ancient and enormous, but with no buses, no line, no rush. It is, quite literally, a less touristy place.
What an Expedition to the Palms in Pijao Is Like
The day begins in a Jeep Willys, the coffee-country icon, climbing a rural road between coffee farms and crystalline streams. The walk starts by saying hello to the children of the Escuela La Palmera, up on the mountain: the tourism we do helps sustain that community, and we don’t bury it in the fine print. Then it’s four and a half kilometers uphill through cloud forest full of ferns, mosses, tiny orchids, and birds you hear before you see.
At the top, the sanctuary. Binoculars for the birds, time for photos, a break with a country snack. On the way back, a partner farm opens its doors with a traditional lunch made with care, and before getting back in the Jeep, the send-off is a cup of freshly brewed coffee. It’s a full-day expedition, of moderate difficulty, up to 2,400 meters — with a hike and a farm lunch — and that’s why it feels different from a one-morning outing.
Pijao
And then there’s the town. It sits tucked into the mountainside, in the south of Quindío. The bell tower is orange and rises over the rooftops like a tulip. Behind the colored doors are gardens — real gardens, tended by people who care for them because they love to, not because tourists walk by. A couple of blocks from the plaza, herons come to nest. And down through the town runs a pure, cold river, straight from the mountain springs.
Pijao moves at another pace: unhurried, with time for the coffee a stranger offers you on the street and for the conversation of the old men in the cantina. That pace helps you understand the place, but it isn’t what makes Pijao what it is.
What makes it is that it’s alive. It’s not a coffee museum: it’s a town where people cook, talk, and farm on an ordinary Tuesday. Pijao is as colorful as the people who live in it.
The Difference the Photos Don’t Show
In Salento, coffee fills the shop windows of Calle Real. In Pijao, it’s the everyday trade.
Here the coffee growers are launching their own brands. Doña Orfilia has spent some fifteen years adding value to her coffee at La Floresta. Carlos Arturo sells his in the plaza. Doña Ligia keeps a nursery of medicinal plants at El Patio and will tell you what each one is good for as you walk.
None of them are performing. They’re working, and they let you watch.
How to Do Both
You don’t have to choose between Salento and Pijao. A day in Salento and Cocora to see what has to be seen, with a guide to explain what you’re looking at. And a day in Pijao — the town and its Wax Palms Expedition — to understand what all of this is really about.
If you only have one day, it’s your call. But ask yourself what you want to bring back: the photo of the palms among the crowds and the lines, or the morning you stood almost alone beneath them and learned the name of the man who made your coffee.
Both are valid answers. They’re just different trips.
The Wax Palms Expedition heads out with small groups on almost any day. If you want that morning beneath the palms, write to us on WhatsApp and we’ll put it together with you.
