Museo de la Cana

The museum occupies the Piedechinche hacienda, a house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its subject is sugar - the crop that has shaped the Cauca valley for four hundred years and still covers most of its floor. Outdoors it holds a collection of trapiches, the mills that crush the cane, arranged to show the technology changing: wooden mills turned by animals, then iron ones, then steam and industrial machinery, several of them working. Gardens hold sugarcane varieties. The house is furnished to the period. The industry was built on enslaved African labour and the museum addresses that in its interpretation rather than presenting the hacienda simply as heritage - the valley's Afro-Colombian population descends substantially from the people who worked these estates.

Highlights

• A collection of trapiches - animal, iron, steam and industrial mills.
• A seventeenth-century hacienda - furnished to the period.
• Cane varieties in the gardens - the crop that shaped the valley.
• The slavery the industry ran on - addressed in the interpretation.

When to go

Year round; closed some Mondays. Two hours.

Practical notes

A car is effectively required - public transport is awkward. Labelling is largely in Spanish. The valley is hot. Working demonstrations of the mills run to a schedule.

Nearby

Hacienda El Paraiso is close; Cali is south-west.