The Cocora Valley is a fold of cold green hills above 2,000 metres in the coffee country of Quindío, in the Colombian Andes, and standing on those hills, each one alone against the sky, are wax palms close to sixty metres tall, the tallest palms on Earth and the national tree of Colombia. The palms grow where no palm should, in cloud and cold, with slender trunks of pale wax-white rising like poles to a burst of fronds far overhead; the early settlers scraped the wax off to make candles and soap and felled the rot-resistant trunks for fence posts, and for generations Colombians cut young fronds to carry on Palm Sunday, stripping the seedlings, until the Church asked them to stop. The palms are also the only tree the yellow-eared parrot will nest in, and as the palms fell the parrot vanished from view, thought extinct until a flock was found in 1999. The loop walk from the village of Salento is the way in: jeeps drop walkers at the valley mouth, and the trail climbs to a ridge where the whole valley opens at once, bare green hills stippled with hundreds of palms.
The loop drops from the palms into dripping cloud forest and crosses the Quindío River on narrow plank-and-cable bridges that sway underfoot, climbing to Acaime, a finca where hummingbirds feed at the windows and hot chocolate with cheese is the reward, before the ridge and the descent back through the palms. Walking up to one of the giants and looking straight up the trunk to the fronds sixty metres overhead is the moment of the walk. The open lower valley is working ranchland, and herders on horseback move cattle between the palms. The valley is walked in a morning from Salento, a town of painted balconies and coffee farms, and the mist comes in by early afternoon. Cocora is a valley where the tallest palms in the world grow in the cold, and the parrot that needs them is back.