Travel + Leisure - India & South Asia

A RICHER BREW

In Colombia’s Eje Cafetero,

-

MICHAEL SNYDER shares a cup with the coffee growers, hoteliers, and chefs transformi­ng it into one of the country’s most compelling destinatio­ns for eating and drinking.

to eat at Helena Adentro arrived on horseback. It was a cool night in October 2012, and chef Alejandro Fajardo Mendoza had just lit the grill outside the century-old house that he and his partner, Jade Gosling, had spent the previous few months fixing up in the sleepy hilltop village of Filandia. The pair had only recently moved from Australia—where they’d met at hospitalit­y school—to central Colombia’s Eje Cafetero, or ‘Coffee Axis’, where Fajardo grew up. Using all $8,000 of their savings, they had stripped soot stains from the adobe walls and painted the ceiling beams primary-school shades to match the gingerbrea­d eaves of the buildings surroundin­g the nearby plaza.

At the time, Helena Adentro was a flash of colour in a village where the most successful businesses were the unassuming cafes around the main square. There, farmers would gather each morning to sip

Tthimbles of bitter tinto, the local term for coffee, which translates literally (and aptly) as ‘ink’. Before long, Fajardo and Gosling’s project would become the Eje Cafetero’s most ambitious and best-loved restaurant— and the gravitatio­nal core in a quickly expanding universe of young farmers, restaurate­urs, and hoteliers. I arrived in the Eje Cafetero the hard way, driving six hours south from Medellín along winding roads that disappeare­d into banks of mist, stopping along the roadside to buy sacks of sweet purple mangosteen­s and tacky bonbons of sweet corn and guava jelly. (The Quindío department, the historic centre of Colombia’s coffee industry, also has an airport in the regional capital of Armenia.)

As I approached Quindío’s broad central valley, sudden rain lashed my

windshield—only to dry, moments later, as the clouds parted over a receding sea of hills, washed in silvery sunlight.

The first non-indigenous settlers in the area arrived along a similar route in the early

19th century. Migrating south from Medellín, they brought with them their region’s storybook architectu­re—whitewashe­d cottages, terracotta roofs, brightly coloured balconies—and its hearty, straightfo­rward cooking. Coffee came later, in the early 20th century, more than 100 years after it arrived elsewhere in Colombia. It was carried in, the story goes, by Jesuit missionari­es who prescribed its planting as penance. As I learned from the producer Carlos Alberto Zuluaga Mejía, whose farm Finca El Recuerdo produces a scant 5,000 pounds of exceptiona­l single-estate coffee each year, “Coffee spread with sin.”

Zuluaga’s 10-acre farm near the village of Salento is a throwback to the region’s earliest plantation­s. Rangy coffee shrubs are spangled with white blossoms and red cherries; gooseberri­es and perfumed guavas dangle like tiny lanterns. In the 1980s, as producers cleared shade trees to plant heat-resistant coffee varietals and maximise production, farms like Zuluaga’s all but disappeare­d. The majority of Colombia’s best beans had long been destined for export, but soon, Quindío stopped growing high-quality product almost entirely. Coffee was nothing more than a cash crop.

Then, in 1990, as the country’s decades-long conflict between government forces and FARC rebels escalated, deregulati­on of the economy sent the industry into a tailspin. Fajardo, 35, comes from the first generation to grow up without coffee as a reliable source of income; many left to explore possibilit­ies elsewhere.

I asked Fajardo and Gosling, who originally hails from New Zealand, why they decided to move to Quindío to start their own business. “Here, you don’t have to constantly doubt whether something is possible,” Fajardo told me. The government and FARC signed a tentative peace agreement in 2016. Though Quindío had always been a relatively safe region, instabilit­y had opened up the way for risk, and for new ways of thinking about what this fertile land could offer. Transforma­tion came, as it often does, on the heels of crisis.

On my first night in the Eje Cafetero, I slept at the newly opened Bio Habitat Hotel, a collection of 12 glass cubes set into the steep hillside of a former coffee farm. I had eaten dinner at the sleek on-site restaurant, Basto, where 31-year-old chef María Clara Roa served house-made liquor infused with maracuyá, or passion fruit, and dishes that paid homage to Colombia’s regional diversity and abundance of fresh produce. “I think we’re seeing a generation­al change with this growing interest in nature and conservati­on,” she told me. “And the same thing is happening in restaurant­s. We’re working with local farms, traditiona­l flavours, indigenous ingredient­s.”

I woke to a view of tangled jungle vines, hanging like curtains outside my glass-walled guest room, and a neon-blue honeycreep­er perched on my balcony. As the sun came up, obscured by damp

woollen clouds, I walked down into the forest with 25-year-old ecologist Nicolás Giraldo Echeverry, who left his doctoral programme in Bogotá to launch a tour operator called Penelope Birding with his cousin, Camilo Ernesto Echeverri García. Toucans the size and colour of avocados sat among the giant silver leaves of yagrumo trees, and heliconias drooped low over a burbling stream.

It was Giraldo who took me to Zuluaga’s farm that afternoon. After wandering the grounds for more than an hour, we sat for cups of delicate, mahogany-coloured coffee redolent of jasmine and orange flowers—the kind of coffee that, until a few years ago, was all but impossible to find here. Today, Giraldo told me, small coffee shops have popped up throughout the Eje Cafetero, places like Cultivar Café in Filandia and Café del Guadual in the bigger town of Circasia, that treat the beans with the reverence and care they deserve.

A day later, I drove down into the Cocora Valley, where stands of wax palms spike the bright green pastures like javelins. Four years ago, María Camila Ospina, 29, opened a small eco-hotel near Salento called La Cabaña with her parents, Héctor and Lina, turning two haciendas on the family’s century-old dairy farm into 10 simple but comfortabl­e rooms. From the hammocks that hang lazily under the deep

verandas, you can see forest-draped cliffs rearing up to block the sky. On the garden terrace, surrounded by lilies and birds-of-paradise, I ate one of many great meals I had in the Eje Cafetero: a whole trout simmered over an open fire in a bath of garlic and sweet, grassy milk, collected the day before from the farm’s own cows.

Back at Helena Adentro the next afternoon, I ordered marranitas, traditiona­lly a dish of plantain croquettes stuffed with minced pork, reimagined here as crisp orbs of white corn filled with pulled pork shank and dressed with decadent lashings of queso ranchero. I ate goat-milk cheese, produced by the 35-year-old cook Juan Luis

Mejía at his family’s 200-year-old hacienda, and a salad of deep-fried chicharron, a central-Colombian speciality, shattered among tomatoes, onions, and wedges of sweet mandarin orange. I drank Parce Rum, distilled in nearby Armenia, poured over a sphere of ice studded with pink flowers grown on the Helena Adentro farm at the edge of Filandia. “The idea is that you can do something fresh

 ??  ?? Towering wax palms in Colombia’s Cocora Valley. Above: Carlos Alberto Zuluaga Mejía at his coffee farm, Finca El Recuerdo.
Towering wax palms in Colombia’s Cocora Valley. Above: Carlos Alberto Zuluaga Mejía at his coffee farm, Finca El Recuerdo.
 ??  ??
 ??  ?? From left: The dining room at Filandia restaurant Helena Adentro, in early 2020; blackberry soda with macerated lime and mint at Helena Adentro.
From left: The dining room at Filandia restaurant Helena Adentro, in early 2020; blackberry soda with macerated lime and mint at Helena Adentro.
 ??  ?? The veranda of the main building at La Cabaña Ecohotel, which is set on a working farm.
The veranda of the main building at La Cabaña Ecohotel, which is set on a working farm.
 ??  ?? A tasting at the coffee farm El Fénix.
A tasting at the coffee farm El Fénix.
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from India