Coffee near Pereira and Manizales, and the detour to Jardín

Café Los Grisales near Pereira

The visit at Los Grisales takes about four hours and is built around the senses: smelling and tasting the coffee at each stage. A guest describes it as a personal tour, with the host explaining the details, tasting a raw bean, picking cherries and following the processing. The listing does not state a transfer or a group size.

Pereira lies in a small valley in the Andes, roughly between Bogotá, Medellín and Cali. By car it is about four hours from Medellín and seven from Bogotá (Wikivoyage), so it works as the first or last stop of a trip through the coffee region.

Staying in Manizales

Manizales sits at the gateway to Los Nevados National Park, and Wikivoyage describes it as being at the heart of the region’s coffee production. Chinchiná, known as the coffee heart of Colombia, is about 30 minutes by bus. We have not yet found a tour from Manizales that we can verify in the same way as the others on this site; the Los Grisales farm near Pereira is the closest one listed here.

Jardín, the farm town in Antioquia

Jardín lies in the far south of Antioquia and has changed little since it was founded in 1864. The main square is lined with colourful buildings and outdoor cafés, and in the past most people here lived from coffee, plantains, beans and sugarcane (Wikivoyage). From Medellín it is 134 km, about two and a half hours by car or three and a half by bus over the Alto de Minas pass. That makes it a trip of its own rather than a day out.

Finca Mariposa offers a three-hour coffee visit that includes a jeep ride. Two guests name the same host, mention picking cherries and the landscape, and one recommends staying two nights in Jardín. The operator is not shown on the product page as we read it, so we list the tour under the farm’s name.

Coming from Medellín and only have a day? The farms in Palmitas and the tours by Metrocable are compared on our Medellín page.