Filandia

Filandia sits on a ridge in the coffee country north of Armenia and looks the way the region is supposed to look: two-storey houses with balconies painted in strong, uneven colours, tall wooden doors, a tiled church on the square and men in ruanas sitting out the morning over coffee. It is quieter and less packaged than Salento a short drive away. The town has a long trade in basketry, weaving cane and vine into baskets in workshops you can walk straight into. On the edge of town a wooden lookout tower, the Mirador Colina Iluminada, looks out over folded green hills towards the Quindio and Risaralda valleys.

History

Before the Spanish the land belonged to the Quimbaya, farmers and goldsmiths who worked gold and tumbaga, an alloy of gold and copper; their numbers fell after the 16th century, and Filandia and most of Quindío stayed largely empty for some 200 years until settlers came from Antioquia. They were here by 1870, and on 20 August 1878 Felipe Meléndez, Eliseo Buitrago and others founded Filandia, the second oldest town in the department, its name read as daughter of the Andes. By 1900 it had some 250,000 coffee bushes and the processing plants that grew up with them, but by 1930 a new highway to the east had bypassed the settlers' road, and the town declined (Wikipedia, Filandia, Quindío).

What you'll find

• The painted balconies - streets of two-storey houses in strong, mismatched colours.
• The basket workshops - weavers working cane and vine by hand.
• Mirador Colina Iluminada - a wooden tower climbed by spiral stairs for the view across the hills.
• The main square - the tiled church and the slow bench-and-coffee routine around it.

When to go

The coffee axis has no true dry season, but December to March and July to August are the least wet. Rain usually arrives in the afternoon, which makes mornings the reliable half of the day. Weekends and Colombian holidays bring day trippers from Pereira and Armenia and the square fills; midweek it is a working town again. The tower is best in the first or last hour of light.

Good to know

It is small, and once you have walked the streets and climbed the tower there is not a great deal left to do. The tower charges to go up and the view is hazy as often as it is clear. The balconies photograph far better than they look under flat grey light. Buses connect but not frequently, and every road in is winding.

Nearby

Salento and the Cocora Valley are about an hour away by road.

Key facts