Risaralda
One of the three departments of the Eje Cafetero, where coffee farming was intensive enough to get the landscape itself named a World Heritage site.
- Country
- Colombia
- Typical elevation
- 1,300 to 1,900 masl
- Harvest
- Main crop October to December, mitaca April to June
Risaralda is one of the three departments of the Eje Cafetero, the coffee axis, alongside Caldas and Quindío. This is the belt that grew most of Colombia's coffee through the twentieth century and built the roads, the cooperatives and the institutions the rest of the country's coffee sector still runs on.
In 2011 UNESCO designated the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia a World Heritage site, covering parts of Risaralda. The citation is about human adaptation: steep slopes farmed in small plots by hand for over a century, with an entire settlement pattern built around one crop.
The terrain is most of the story. Slopes here are steep enough that mechanization was never an option, which kept farms small and picking manual. Pereira, the capital, sits in the middle of it.
The reputation problem is that the Eje Cafetero is also where Colombian commodity coffee comes from, so a specialty lot from Risaralda is working against what the name signals. The growers running experimental processing here are doing it in a region built for volume.
In 2011 UNESCO designated the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia a World Heritage site, covering parts of Risaralda. The citation is about human adaptation: steep slopes farmed in small plots by hand for over a century, with an entire settlement pattern built around one crop.
The terrain is most of the story. Slopes here are steep enough that mechanization was never an option, which kept farms small and picking manual. Pereira, the capital, sits in the middle of it.
The reputation problem is that the Eje Cafetero is also where Colombian commodity coffee comes from, so a specialty lot from Risaralda is working against what the name signals. The growers running experimental processing here are doing it in a region built for volume.
