The heart of Colombia's coffee country — the Quindío Coffee Cultural Landscape, wax palms at 2,400m, and the Jeep Willys culture of the Eje Cafetero
Armenia is the capital of the Quindío department — the smallest of Colombia's departments, at the centre of the Eje Cafetero (Coffee Axis), the trio of departments (Quindío, Risaralda, Caldas) in the central Andes that produce the majority of Colombia's world-famous coffee. The city of Armenia (330,000 people) is the commercial and administrative hub; the reason to base here is the surrounding landscape — the 'Paisaje Cultural Cafetero' (Coffee Cultural Landscape), a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2011 that protects the specific combination of traditional farm architecture (the farmhouses w…
The Quindío department was settled primarily in the 19th century through the Colombian colonisation of the Andes (the 'Antioqueño colonisation' or colonización antioquena) — migration of Antioqueño families from the north into the underpopulated central Andean mountains, clearing forest and establishing coffee farms from the 1850s to 1930s. This colonisation created the distinctive paisa culture and landscape — a culture of small-farm family coffee production (as opposed to the large plantation model of Brazil) that the 2011 UNESCO designation specifically recognises as a cultural heritage of…