Pereira
— — the city the coffee road runs through.
Not only on a wall.
“Pereira sits high above the Otún River where Colombia's coffee country pulls itself together. The Bolívar Desnudo rides into the plaza, a bare horseman cast in bronze, and the air smells faintly of roasting beans most afternoons. The Andes climb to the south, the cordillera falls away west. People here call it the Pearl of the Otún.
Pereira, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Pereira is the capital of Risaralda department in west-central Colombia, sitting at about 1,411 metres on the western flank of the Central Cordillera of the Andes. The city was founded in 1863 by Francisco Pereira Martínez and grew through the late-nineteenth-century coffee boom. It now anchors the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia, inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 across six departments and forty-seven municipalities. The Otún River runs along the northern edge of the urban core, descending from the Los Nevados páramo. Manizales lies fifty kilometres north, Armenia fifty kilometres south, on the same coffee road.
Coffee here runs on two harvests. The main mitaca, or fly crop, comes in April and May; the main cosecha runs from October through December, and the cherries flush red on slopes from about 1,200 to 1,800 metres. The Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, headquartered in Bogotá since 1927, governs the protected origin. Pereira and the surrounding fincas produce a washed Arabica known for clean acidity and citrus notes. Roasters in town serve it black in small ceramic cups, and the fincas above the city open for tastings most weekends.
The Plaza de Bolívar holds the city's most photographed work, the Bolívar Desnudo by Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, unveiled in 1963 and cast in roughly six tonnes of bronze. The Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Pobreza stands across the square, rebuilt in reinforced concrete after the 1995 earthquake. Matecaña International Airport sits west of the centre with direct flights from Bogotá, Medellín, and a handful of US gateways. Hostels and small hotels cluster around Circunvalar Avenue. Most visitors continue on to the wax palms of the Cocora Valley, an hour south near Salento.