Salento is a small town south of Medellín in Colombia nestled amongst the mountains. It is a perfect location for growing coffee and in fact the majority of the coffee produced in Colombia comes from this region. Great coffee in combination with beautiful scenery and unique wax palm trees made it a must-see on my Colombia list!
I arrived in Salento after touring Salamina and Samaria Valley, which have a similar landscape with the wax palms, so I was unsure how Salento would compare. I had heard it could be very touristy, which I don’t tend to like, but I was pleasantly surprised. The town is very quiet and peaceful. A church stands at the head of the central square, with a small park in the center where locals were relaxing on the benches and children were playing. Several shops and restaurants line the main square and extend down the side streets, but the town is not particularly large and there were not too many tourists there, just enough to be enjoyable.
The two main attractions in Salento are touring the coffee farms and visiting Cocora Valley. I decided to tour a coffee farm the first day and visit Cocora Valley on the second. Cocora Valley was absolutely beautiful, you can read my post about it here. For the coffee tour, I chose to tour the Don Elias Coffee Farm, which is about an hour’s walk from the town (you can also take a jeep from the main square for about 3,000 COP). The walk was nice though, leading down a gravel road through the hills, passing a few other coffee farms on the way.
Don Elias is a family-owned, all organic coffee farm. It is relatively small, but the entire process from growing the plants to packaging the final product is carried out at the farm. I joined a small group of other tourists on a personal tour through the coffee farm (10,000 COP when I visited). Our guide first led us through the plantation and showed us the coffee plants. He explained that there were two types of beans, red and green, and that they grew both on the plantation. It feels more like walking through a jungle than through a agricultural farm because they plant other trees like banana and avocado trees amongst the coffee to provide shade for the coffee plants and extra nutrients in the soil. He let us pick some of the ripe beans and bring them up to the processing area, where he showed us the hand-cranked machine they use to separate the beans from the outer layer.
Our guide then showed us where they lay the beans out to dry in the sun, then roast them slowly over a wood stove. The roasted beans are then packaged for sale. The tour ended with a fresh cup of coffee made from the roasted beans, which was absolutely delicious and a perfect end to the tour.
Salento turned out to be one of my favorite places in Colombia. It was the perfect combination of beautiful natural scenery, plenty of activities, and of course great coffee! The food there was very good too, with a tasty vegetarian restaurant in the town and a couple of other restaurants nearby which offered delicious veggie options. I stayed at Hilltop Hostel which was one of the cheapest options in town (only 20,000 COP for a dorm bed when I visited) but had a great vibe, plenty of other travelers to talk to, and a beautiful view of the sunset from the roof in the evenings. I’d definitely recommend adding Salento to your itinerary if you’re traveling through Colombia, it’s worth the effort to get there and every minute spent.
From Medellín:
To get to Salento from Medellín, you have to first take a bus to Pereira (there are usually four departures throughout the day and the journey takes about 6 hours). From Pereira, you can take a bus to Salento (about an hour).
To leave Salento, if you’re headed south take the bus to Armenia. From there you can connect to buses headed for Cali and other southern locations. To head back towards Medellín or Bogota, take the bus from Salento back to Pereira.
- Be sure to tour at least one of the coffee farms! I really enjoyed touring Don Elias but there are several other farms to choose from. It is really cool to learn the whole process of making coffee and see where so much of the coffee we drink comes from.
- Take a day to tour Cocora Valley. You’ll need to allow plenty of time for it but it is absolutely gorgeous and definitely worth fitting into your Salento itinerary.
- Prices in Salento can be little higher than the rest of Colombia since tourism is a big industry there, but you can save money by walking places instead of taking private jeeps and by searching out good deals on restaurants/hostels (you may have to visit several but don’t assume the first prices you see are representative of everything in the town).
- Bring a rain jacket! It rains a lot in Salento area and Cocora Valley so be expecting some rain and mud when you visit.
