Cocora Valley is filled with the tallest palms on Earth — wax palms that climb close to 60 metres, taller than any other palm and the tallest of all the world's monocot plants. Stranger still is where they grow: not in a steamy lowland but in a cold, cloud-wrapped Andean valley above 2,000 metres, their slender trunks sheathed in the pale wax that gives the species its name, Ceroxylon, or "wax wood." Colombia made the wax palm its national tree in 1985 and banned its felling, yet the trees standing alone across the open green hills tell a quieter story. They grow astonishingly slowly — a palm needs about 80 years just to flower — and cattle now graze the pastures where seedlings once took root, so these giants have almost no young coming up behind them. Long considered vulnerable, the species has recently been judged critically endangered.
Most visitors meet the valley on foot, on a loop of about eleven kilometres that starts with a ride out from the town of Salento in a war-surplus Willys jeep. Muddy paths wind through cloud forest, cross a river on swaying plank bridges, and climb to a ridge where the whole valley opens beneath you — bare emerald hills with hundreds of palms rising over them, appearing and vanishing as mist drifts through. A short detour reaches Acaime, a reserve where hummingbirds crowd the feeders and a hot drink comes with the ticket. The palms are the only nesting place of the yellow-eared parrot, a bird once thought extinct and now recovered after a Church decree ended the cutting of fronds for Palm Sunday. The valley sits inside Los Nevados National Park, in the coffee country that UNESCO named a World Heritage cultural landscape and where some of the world's most prized coffee grows.