Colombia’s coffee zone with its rolling green mountains has long been associated with steaming hot cups of coffee and ruana-clad peasant farmers in the classic style of Juan Valdez. An area of some 25 towns in the states of Quindí­o, Risaralda and Caldas with a population of almost three million, coffee country is mainly populated by adventurous settlers who came at the end of the 19th century, looking for new land and a better way of life.

What’s relatively new in the coffee zone are tourists, a new kind of agricultural tourism that’s mostly domestic, but sets the stage for international tourism in better times. The region has mostly managed to avoid the political violence plaguing most of Colombia, but low coffee prices and the country’s tumultuous financial crisis have caused inventive coffee producers to look for other sources of income—and, for the most part, to avoid the temptation of illicit activities.

Despite the media focus on the drug/violence axis, and the impression it gives of countrywide chaos, about 90 percent of violent conflict-related incidents occur in remote areas against local inhabitants, far from this coffee-growing central region of Colombia.

Colombia has developed the most comprehensive production, export and marketing system of any coffee producing country. The system, directed by the private non-profit institution National Federation of Coffee Growers (Fedecafe), acts both as an exporter and as an agent between coffee growers and other independent exporters. It also oversees a wide range of other functions related to the coffee sector, including operating a minimum price for growers, agronomic and technical research and extension, monitoring quality standards, and processing coffee. For the last 70 years, Federacafe has been providing services for the families of coffee producers and investing in physical and social infrastructure to generate regional development. The building of rural highways, water systems, schools, electricity, and health care centers has contributed to the relative prosperity of the region, and also provided an infrastructure amenable to attracting tourists. Investments in industries other than coffee have also been part of the long-term strategy of Fedecafe to generate regional development.

However, in the last decade, market conditions for coffee have changed radically. Favorable regulatory stipulations in the International Coffee Agreement ended, and the coffee sector became subject to the vacillations of the international coffee market. In turn, international prices plunged with the entry of new coffee producers into the market and the slow growth in the level of international consumption.

More than ever, diversification became a theme for coffee growers. That’s how they decided that coffee plantations could serve to not only export “the richest coffee in the world,” but also to import tourists and to generate complementary income through a new dimension in the region’s economy, agro-tourism or rural tourism.

The coffee-growing region had already acquired a certain romantic caché through the popular soap opera Café—or Coffee—a story about love and power set on a coffee plantation. In addition, the climate is neither hot nor cold, and can be reached by roads that are generally safe, an important factor in choosing vacation destinations in Colombia. And, ironically, as the economy declined, middle-class vacationers were increasingly thinking about domestic vacations to substitute for weekends in Miami.

Attempts to diversify family income in the coffee region are difficult. Unfortunately history has shown that there are few real alternatives to diversification for coffee farmers in today’s world. Only some few farmers that try to diversify their income through on-farm diversification projects are successful. In fact, it is estimated that only one out of 30 diversification intents are successful, the rest fail mainly for two reasons; markets for new products do not exist or are weakly consolidated, and second, technology base is not complete or too sophisticated to be used by uneducated farmers. Among the successful stories of diversification is that of agro-tourism in the coffee zone.

A relatively high literacy rate, coupled with the tranquility of the zone, contribute to a stable workforce that can be trained for service industries such as agro-tourism. Social-economic indicators, ranging from the low level of violence and political instability to figures on health and education, show that the coffee-growing states are better off than the national average. For example, the Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN), a proxy for poverty, is at the 20% level in the coffee region, while for the rest of the rural Colombia is 65%; the number of murders per 10,000 habitants is 5.8 compared with 10.3 with the rest of the rural sector; and, illiteracy is 6 percent points below the rate for the rest of the rural sector.

Rural tourism is not a new idea in countries that have tried to generate dynamism in their rural areas. Clear examples of these attempts appear in some regions in Spain where government has successfully stopped migration from rural to urban areas. In fact, the development of tourism was able to reverse the migration flow, and now, many former urban settlers are finding the rural area as an interesting opportunity to improve their quality of live. A similar story can be told in Argentina with the Turismo de Estancias with the RATUR program; the LEADER program that has fomented this activity across Europe; and, the already consolidated industry in the Czech Republic. However, in these countries the origin of this rural tourism industry came from a well-defined public strategy, while the case of the coffee region appears to be endogenous as a logical extension of using the natural resources, and without looking at models in other countries. It was only after tourism became important, that institutional attention was directed to support this initiative.

The coffee-growers understood that Colombians have a social inclination towards nature and rural roots as part of the national patrimony, and that’s an important element in this new style of vacation. That’s how rural tourism curiously appears as a force that’s contradictory to the “natural” force produced in countries in the process of development, in which agriculture is increasingly separated spatially and socially from the development process.

Hundreds of small coffee plantations have been adapted to bring in tourists and to attract nature enthusiasts with total relaxation. Thousands of visitors come to the region each week. In most cases, the coffee plantations are hosted by their owners, experts in making people feel welcome and in cooking up a storm with the typical food of the region, beans, savory pork rinds, small corn pancakes called “arepas” and a special corn-based drink that’s almost a soup called “mazamorra.” The charm of the large plantation houses is in the smell of coffee and bananas wafting in from the mountains and permeating the very wood of the houses, in the silence of the clouds, interrupted only by the singing of birds; and the leisurely pace of sharing coffee and food with loved ones. Children in particular are attracted by the great variety of animals and pets around the farmhouse.

A family can spend the night for only US $30. But there are bigger farmhouses that can accommodate up to twenty guests, for about US $150 daily. Federacafe implemented a strategy to advertise these houses with catalogs and generated incentives to travel agencies to show the coffee region as a tourist option for potential travelers. Federacafe also put in practice a training program for members of the coffee families to make them real entrepreneurs of tourism, and most importantly, educating them to provide a quality service to the tourist. The region became very attractive not only to families that spend from a weekend to a complete two-three week vacation, but also to large public and private conventions and corporate meetings. They highly value what the region has to offer in terms of natural resources and recreational facilities.

In addition to promoting rural tourism through rural stays, theme parks have sprung up in the coffee-growing area to entice families and other tourists. The first and most important of these theme parks is in Montenegro, the so-called Coffee Park or Parque del Café, a combined museum, amusement park, and ecological trail, that provide the tourist with a magical re-encounter with the coffee culture. The park is history, with its life-scale replica of a coffee town; it is nature, with its jungle walk in which finds thousands of types of flora and fauna; it’s a botanical fantasy with its Orchid Show, in which orquids of every type dance and sing in Disney fashion to entertain and convey ecological messages. It’s a food-lover’s paradise with countless stands selling cotton candy, ices, and the typical corn pancakes known as arepas. The park, which also features a skyride and an observation bridge from which one can overlook the entire state, was built by Fedecafe, as way of educating the tourist about the history and culture of coffee through the Coffee Museum. Another focus is that of biodiversity, which offers the tourist a landscape of orchids and ferns.

The second park, the National Farmlands Park, Panaca, opened in 1999 as a theme park that promotes interaction between city folks and the countryside to promote understanding of the role of agriculture in the national economy. Kids get to feed the pigs, give bottles to little goats, and try to outwit the trained dogs, who are experts at arithmetic.

The coffee region also offers other tourist attractions such as the Guadua Park, which focuses on the region’s architecture, and the Pereira Zoo, the largest in the country. Natural attractions such as lakes and snowclad mountains also attract tourists. Despite the country’s negative, violence-torn image, more and more tourists were traveling to this region. It is estimated that around 2,000 people visited the region every weekend. But just when the region was consolidating its infrastructure to provide an economic alternative to the hard hit coffee economy, an earthquake struck the coffee region in 1999. Just as the tourist region in the Caribbean has discovered that its tourism ebbs and flows with natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, the Colombian coffee region learned that tourism can be as unstable as coffee prices.

More than a thousand people died, 4,000 injuries and another 25,000 residents in the rural area were displaced as a result of the earthquake. While it did not cause direct damage to coffee trees and other agricultural products, the damage to processing and storage structures, worker’s homes, as well as community infrastructure, was substantial. Roads, aqueducts, and agro-hotel facilities were severely damaged, and the theme parks had to shut down. However, the region’s tenacious residents and the National Federation of Coffee Growers immediately began the reconstruction process, and the tourist infrastructure was rehabilitated within a year, and the Theme Parks opened only three months after the tragedy.

Three years after the catastrophic event, agrotourism appears to be the salvation table for many coffee growers who are experimenting the worst crisis in history, a crisis that sadly does not seem to have an end soon. During last vacation season, more than 100,000 tourists visited the coffee-growing region, according to the Chamber of Commerce of the region, and more and more farmhouses are being adapted to welcome new people from other parts of Colombia and the world.

However, there are still problems the tourist sector faces that have to be solved in order to consolidate the region to its fullest potential. First, and most important, it’s the progress toward peace, which, in turn, depends upon the social and economic stability of the country. In this spiral effect, creative initiatives such as agrotourism appear as the breaking point to have a stable social environment in the country.