Trekking from Colombia’s coffee region to the Nevados mountains

Santa Rosa de Cabal is a small town in Colombia’s coffee region with access to the impressive mountains of the Los Nevados national park.

Low-risk areas like the coffee region are becoming very accessible to foreigners. Near Santa Rosa de Cabal – one of the coffee towns in Risaralda near Pereira – one can freely walk the roads and tracks lined by fincas and campesino homes.

The fincas are typically second homes owned by wealthy people who live in the city and keep them as weekend retreats. They have gardens, swimming pools and maybe some agricultural land.

Beside the fincas, the campesino homes are basic with small plots of heavily cultivated land, yielding an incredibly rich variety of foods from the tierra negra (black earth). Coffee, bananas, plantains, yuca and many other foods are grown at a subsistence level. The land here is rich, but while a campesino family may live from the land, they make little money as the plots are so small.

The home of the family of one such campesino, Fernando, looks out over valleys of coffee fields extending beyond his veranda. His own land fell steeply from the ridge where his home was. At a nearby coffee farm, seasonal workers pick, wash and dry coffee beans to be bagged and taken to Santa Rosa where they are weighed in and loaded on to trucks to be shipped abroad from Cartagena or Buenaventura. The coffee farming system is a relative agricultural success in rural Colombia that has allowed for a comparatively broad social spectrum to participate in the international market.

Drinking coffee at dawn in the very source of its production one can watch birds of paradise flit between avocado and mango trees, and to some extent envy the simplicity of a campesino existence.

From the coffee fields near Santa Rosa de Cabal, a rough road leads up to Los Nevados National Park — several volcanic peaks rising to over 5000 meters. Traditional Colombian manufactured Willy’s jeeps carry local people and their produce along these roads throughout the area. Above the coffee fields, the cultivated land gives way to cloud forest and a belt of pastoral land. San Vicente ecological resort is nestled in a ravine where waterfalls cascade to meet naturally heated pools, a steep 16km climb from Santa Rosa in this cloud forest. It is an hour by vehicle or five hours on foot.

As the road winds up into the clouds and thinner air above San Vicente it passes through a gorge where a river hidden from view by dense foliage thunders down from the mountains. The snowmelt from Los Nevados provides water for thousands of people living in the region below.  Healthy cows feed on the grasses at this altitude. The people are hospitable and may offer you a bed for the night if you strike up conversation. It feels there is little to fear, save for shortness of breath and altitude sickness. Still, Fernando’s advice was of caution. “There are bandits in those hills.”

Getting There

• Local bus from Pereira to Santa Rosa de Cabal – twenty minutes COP1,400. Head to the central market where Willy’s jeep owners gather. Ask around for a vehicle to San Vicente Termales. You may have to walk the last couple of miles.

Personal Safety

• No recent reports of violence on this route. Travel with a warm and friendly attitude.
• Few vehicles pass higher than San Vicente, but with luck you could catch a ride to Los Nevados National Park. To do this, carry means for survival at high altitude, as few people live there.