Colombia's national tree is also the tallest palm on Earth. Ceroxylon quindiuense — the wax palm — pushes past sixty metres in a single high valley folded into the Central Andes, roughly 2,400 metres above sea level. Congress declared it the national tree in 1985, by which point cutting for Palm Sunday fronds and candle wax had thinned the stands severely. Anyone booking Cocora Valley Tour From Medellin tours today is visiting a forest that was rescued rather than simply found. The name is thought to derive from a Quimbaya word meaning "star of water", a fair description of a basin the Quindío River leaves in ribbons. The valley forms part of the western buffer of Los Nevados National Natural Park, and its weather is the whole point: cloud climbs the slope by late morning and condenses on the crowns, feeding the mosses and bromeliads that colonise every trunk. The entrance sits at Vía al Valle de Cocora, Km 11, above the town of Salento in Quindío — the address behind almost all Cocora Valley Tour From Medellin tickets. Wax palms grow slowly, a few centimetres a year, and individual trees are believed to stand for more than a century. Many of the crowns above the pasture therefore predate the cattle grazing beneath them. That mixed landscape of grass and giants is not primeval forest but a working valley that policy caught in time. Bird life is dense: the sword-billed hummingbird works the cloud-forest edge, and the endangered yellow-eared parrot nests almost exclusively in these palms. A conservation fee of 20,000 COP per person, charged at the main entrance, funds the trail network and the replanting behind it. Context matters for travellers coming from Antioquia. Salento, founded in 1842, is the oldest town in Quindío and sits inside the Coffee Cultural Landscape inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 — the same terrain of ridge farms, bahareque houses and Willys jeeps that gives the Eje Cafetero its identity. Valle de Cócora lies some 300 kilometres south of Medellín, which is why a Cocora Valley Tour From Medellin is framed as an overnight rather than an afternoon: the itinerary attached to this page runs two days and pairs the palms with Salento and the region's thermal springs. The distance is the reason the valley still looks the way it does.