Pereira: the heart of the Coffee Triangle

Main city of Colombia's coffee triangle, Pereira is the most convenient departure point for visiting the farms that have made the country famous worldwide.

The center can be explored on foot; visiting plantations requires a car or organized tour.

On Plaza de Bolívar, the equestrian statue of Bolívar sculpted in 1963 by Rodrigo Arenas Betancur depicts the liberator and his horse both nude, a choice that raised no small amount of controversy at the time.

A few steps away, the Botanical Garden of the Technological University of Pereira hosts one of the region's richest orchid collections, along with a butterfly house.

In the afternoon it's worthwhile to leave the city for the Coffee Triangle, the coffee cultural landscape that became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2011, where mountain fincas offer tours among the plants and drying houses.

Returning to Pereira in the evening, a cup of local coffee, often offered at the end of the tour, closes the day with the same product just harvested a few hours earlier.

The naked statue of Bolívar remains even today a matter of discussion between those who consider it an audacious artistic reinterpretation and those who have always judged it disrespectful toward the national hero.

The coffee farms of the Eje Cafetero harvest the beans still by hand, one by one, because coffee plants on these steep slopes ripen at different times even on the same plant.