Cafés in Colombia Medellín, Bogotá and Cartagena

From Jesuit missions to the growers' federation

Coffee came with the Jesuits. The earliest written record is in El Orinoco ilustrado, José Gumilla's book of 1730, which mentions coffee at the mission of Santa Teresa de Tabajé.³ Commercial growing began in the northeast near the Venezuelan border, where tradition credits a priest, Francisco Romero, with spreading the crop by handing parishioners in Salazar de las Palmas coffee planting as penance after confession.³

Small farms in Santander and Norte de Santander multiplied from 1875. In the early 20th century, settlers clearing new land in Antioquia, Caldas, Valle and northern Tolima set the pattern that still defines Colombian coffee: the small family farm.³ On June 27, 1927, growers at the second national coffee congress in Medellín founded the FNC, which still steers the sector a century later.⁴

Where Colombian coffee grows

One department leads the harvest. Huila grew 19.65% of Colombia's coffee in 2025, up from 19.08% in 2024, and has been the largest producer for 15 consecutive years. Its biggest coffee municipality is Pitalito, with 17,790 ha planted.⁵

The best-known landscape lies further north, in Caldas, Risaralda and Quindío, the Eje Cafetero (coffee axis). In 2011 UNESCO inscribed the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia, 141,120 ha of farms and 18 towns spread over six sites, as a World Heritage Site.⁶

Tinto, perico, pintadito: how Colombians order

The everyday cup is a tinto, a strong black coffee, often sweetened with sugar and sold on street corners from insulated flasks.¹² On the Caribbean coast, in Barranquilla, Cartagena and Santa Marta, the vendors are called tinteros, and in Bogotá "¿nos tomamos un tintico?" is an invitation to stop and talk as much as to drink.⁷

Milk changes the name by region. In Bogotá and the Cundiboyacense plateau, a perico is a small coffee with milk, often taken with almojábana or pandebono, two cheese breads. In Antioquia and the Eje Cafetero, a pintadito has just a little milk, and a chaqueta is black coffee mixed with hot aguapanela, panela (unrefined cane sugar) dissolved in water.⁷

The counter sets the price more than the city does. In October 2026, El Colombiano found tintos at COP 1,000–1,500 in bakeries around Parque de Guadalupe in Medellín's Manrique, from about COP 4,700 at Pergamino, COP 5,300 at Juan Valdez and COP 9,500 at Starbucks.⁸

Pasilla, Juan Valdez and specialty coffee

Historically most Colombian coffee was exported, and the lower grade left for the home market was known as pasilla.¹³ Tinto was traditionally brewed from those leftover beans.¹² The FNC took its own brand to the high street in 2002, when it opened the first Juan Valdez Café in Bogotá; by 2022 the chain had more than 500 outlets in over 20 countries.⁹

One of the first specialty roasters was Bogotá's Amor Perfecto. Luis Fernando Vélez learned to use a French press on a trip to London in 1992 and founded the company in 1997. As of late 2025 it ran eight cafés in Bogotá and one in a heritage house in Armenia.¹⁰ His case was that Colombia needed its own roasters, baristas and cuppers before it could drink its best coffee.¹⁰ Amor Perfecto's barista Diego Campos won the 2021 World Barista Championship in Milan.¹³

Medellín, Bogotá and Cartagena

Medellín fills a narrow valley between two Andean ranges, with farms within reach.¹² Pergamino, which Pedro Echavarría opened in El Poblado in 2012, comes from a family that has grown coffee in Antioquia for nearly 40 years and now works with more than 600 smallholders in Antioquia, Cauca and Nariño.¹¹ El Poblado and Laureles are the usual neighborhoods for specialty coffee,¹² while bakery counters in barrios such as Manrique pour the cheapest tintos in the city.⁸

Bogotá stands at about 2,640 m and stays cool all year.¹⁴ Its specialty cafés gather in Chapinero and Quinta Camacho, around Zona G, in Usaquén and, more thinly, in La Candelaria, the old center; most roast in house and buy straight from growers.¹³ Libertario, in Zona G, buys from about 100 farming families within 10 km of its own farm in Zipacón, Cundinamarca.¹³

In Cartagena street coffee is an organized trade: its vendors have their own association, 65 strong in October 2020, when about 50 of them went to city hall to complain that some vendors' thermoses had been seized and never returned.¹⁵