Quindío

Quindío is the small department at the heart of Colombia’s coffee axis, the Eje Cafetero. Most of it lies on the western face of the Cordillera Central, its coffee grows at around 1,400–2,000 metres, and it is home to the National Coffee Park and part of UNESCO’s Coffee Cultural Landscape. It’s also a region in transition: it grows far less coffee than it once did, and more of it is aimed at quality. Here’s what to know.

The short version

• The coffee axis: with Caldas and Risaralda, Colombia’s best-known coffee region.
• About 1,400–2,000 m above sea level.
• Two harvests: September to December, and a fly crop in April and May.
• Shrinking but specialising: about 18,000 hectares of coffee, down from about 62,000.
• UNESCO-listed landscape, and the National Coffee Park.
• Hit by the August 2026 earthquake, then by El Niño.

Where is Quindío?

In west-central Colombia. Wikipedia describes it as the second-smallest department in the country, 0.2% of its territory, with 12 municipalities and its capital at Armenia. Most of it lies on the western face of the Cordillera Central, from about 1,100 metres in the valley of the La Vieja river up to 5,150 metres on the Nevado del Quindío. With Caldas and Risaralda, it forms the core of the coffee axis, and Wikipedia calls its economy based mainly on the coffee harvest.

What is Quindío coffee like?

Fruity and chocolatey. Colombia’s coffee growers’ federation (FNC), which sets the official regional profiles, describes a fruity, nutty aroma, a fruity, bitter-chocolate flavour, medium, citric acidity and a medium, creamy body. It’s grown high and picked twice a year. Sample Coffee Roasters gives these details for the region:

	Quindío (Sample Coffee Roasters)	Colombia as a whole (USDA)
Altitude	1,400–2,000 m	Not given nationally
Main harvest	September–December	October–December
Second harvest	April–May (the fly crop)	April–June (the mitaca), mostly in the central coffee region
Varieties	Typica, Castillo, Caturra	Rust-resistant varieties on 87% of the area

Quindío’s growers are also experimenting. A grower representative told Crónica del Quindío in 2025 that some farmers are trying extended and anaerobic fermentations and honey processing to offer a more distinctive coffee, and that the quality shows in the number of local farm brands. The Armenia Chamber of Commerce counted 288 specialty coffee shops in the department in 2024, the newspaper reported.

How did the 2026 earthquake affect Quindío?

On 10 August 2026, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia at 7:34 in the morning, Semana reported. Quindío’s coffee growers’ committee began assessing damage in all 12 municipalities, covering more than 5,300 coffee families, and closed its damaged offices in Filandia, Buenavista and Montenegro.

The committee later counted more than 1,200 damaged wet mills, where farms turn freshly picked cherries into dry green coffee, El Tiempo reported in September, just as the end-of-year harvest began. It estimated Quindío’s 2026 production at 213,500 bags of green coffee, 102,480 of them in the second half of the year, mainly in Quimbaya, Montenegro, Filandia, Circasia, La Tebaida and Armenia. Then came El Niño: a Quindío growers’ leader, Faber Buitrago Patiño, told El Tiempo that the heat and drought had raised coffee berry borer and low-grade beans, cutting what farmers are paid below the federation’s reference price.

Why has Quindío lost so much coffee?

The figures are stark. The FNC’s coffee information system counted 18,401 hectares in 2024, Agronegocios reported. A Quindío grower, Gustavo Alberto Patiño, told Crónica del Quindío in 2026 that the department once had about 62,000 hectares of coffee and now has about 18,000. A year earlier, a growers’ representative said the decline had slowed to about 100 hectares a year, from about 1,200, and had stabilised at around 17,000 hectares; he put Quindío’s share of Colombia’s production at about 2%.

Patiño traced a long shift in how coffee is grown. From the 1960s and 1970s, he said, Colombia began leaving traditional shade-grown coffee behind for varieties such as Caturra, farmed more intensively, with more plants and more fertiliser, and lost much of the shade that had always surrounded the coffee. Compare Santander, where nearly all coffee is still grown under shade. Today the talk in Quindío is of quality over quantity: Patiño argued for “productivity with more quality”.

What’s the history of coffee in Quindío?

When	What happened	Source
1842	Salento, the first settlement in the area, is founded	Wikipedia
19th century	Settlers from Antioquia move in, trading by mule caravan	Wikipedia
From 1875	Small coffee growers multiply in Antioquia and the region known as Old Caldas	Wikipedia
1960	The National Coffee Party is first held in Calarcá, every year in late June	Wikipedia
1995	The National Coffee Park opens near Montenegro on 24 February	Wikipedia
1999	A 6.4-magnitude earthquake hits the coffee zone on 25 January	Wikipedia
2011	UNESCO lists the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia	Wikipedia
2026	A magnitude 7.4 earthquake on 10 August damages more than 1,200 wet mills	Semana; El Tiempo

What is there to see?

Plenty. The National Coffee Park (Parque del Café), about 4 km south-west of Montenegro and 11 km west of Armenia, was opened by the coffee growers’ federation and Quindío’s growers’ committee; it has a coffee museum, a garden of coffee varieties and rides, and Wikipedia calls it one of Colombia’s top tourist attractions, with more than a million visitors in 2017. Salento and the Cocora Valley, home of the wax palm, Colombia’s national tree, are nearby. The UNESCO landscape’s urban centres include Armenia and Calarcá.

Quindío and other Colombian origins

• Coffee in Colombia: the whole country, its harvests and its figures.
• Santander: shade-grown coffee in the north-east.
• Colombian tinto: how Colombians brew it at home.