Colombia's national tree grows to sixty metres, higher than any other palm on earth, and it grows almost nowhere but here. The wax palm, Ceroxylon quindiuense, was declared the national symbol in 1985, at a point when its groves had been thinned for church processions and cattle pasture. Protection followed. The Valle de Cocora, a cloud-forest corridor on the western flank of Los Nevados National Natural Park, now shelters the densest surviving stands. The name comes from Quimbaya, the language of the people who farmed these ridges before the Spanish arrived; it is usually translated as "star of water." The translation is apt. Rain reaches the upper valley on more than two hundred days a year, and the cloud that gathers by early afternoon is the same moisture that feeds the Quindío River below. That climate explains the second crop for which the region is known. Salento sits at roughly 1,895 metres, within the Coffee Cultural Landscape inscribed by UNESCO in 2011, where arabica ripens slowly and picks are still made by hand across steep, terraced fincas. A cocora valley coffee tour joins the two histories — the palms above, the coffee below — because in Quindío they were never separate. Salento itself was founded in 1842 along the Camino Nacional, the mule road cut between Ibagué and the Cauca valley. Its Calle Real still carries the balconied bahareque houses of that period: cane-and-mud frames, lime render, shutters painted in the saturated blues, ochres and greens that became the visual signature of the coffee axis. Prisoners building the road were the town's first settlers. Coffee arrived later, through the Antioquian colonisation that pushed south with seedlings, oxen and land claims. What remains is a working landscape rather than a preserved one. Cattle still graze beneath the palms. Smallholders still process cherries in patios behind their houses, and the wet mills, drying beds and cupping tables that Valle de Cocora tours from Salento visit belong to families, not museums. The cloud forest above holds spectacled bears, mountain tapir and some three hundred bird species, among them the yellow-eared parrot that nests only in wax palms and was once thought extinct. Conservation of the valley, funded through the 20,000 COP entrance fee at the main gate, is what allows a cocora valley coffee tour to exist at all. The palms outlive everyone who walks beneath them; a mature specimen can stand for over a century.