🇨🇴 Colombia · Coffee Region
Pereira is the 'Pearl of the Otún' and the capital of Risaralda, one of the three big cities of the Eje Cafetero along with Manizales and Armenia. Unlike its neighbor Manizales, perched high on the cordillera, Pereira sits lower (around 1,400 meters) and so has a warmer, more agreeable climate, with a commercial, modern and lively character. It's a thriving city, known for its open people and for its strategic position in the heart of the Coffee Cultural Landscape, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2011.
The city was founded in 1863 on the ruins of the old Cartago Viejo, in a process that mixed migration from Cauca with the great wave of Antioquian colonization then populating these mountains in search of land to plant coffee. From that history and that drive came a hardworking, civic-minded city that took its name from the patriot Francisco Pereira Martínez. Today Pereira is a hub of business, universities and commerce, and at the same time the gateway to some of the loveliest natural attractions in Colombia.
As a destination, Pereira shines for its position: it has the best-connected airport in the region (Matecaña) and from there you can quickly reach volcanic hot springs in Santa Rosa de Cabal, the Otún Quimbaya Flora and Fauna Sanctuary for birdwatching and howler monkeys, the enormous Ukumarí biopark, and postcard coffee towns. The city itself welcomes you with its Plaza de Bolívar and the famous (and controversial) Bolívar Desnudo, its iconic viaduct and an intense urban life. Give it two or three days and combine it with the rest of the Eje.
Pereira was founded on 30 August 1863, days after the death of Francisco Pereira Martínez, when Father Remigio Antonio Cañarte led the founding caravan that traveled from Cartago to these lands to carry out the patriot's wishes. The new town was raised on the ruins of the old Cartago Viejo and took the name Pereira in his honor. Driven by the Antioquian colonization and by coffee, it grew from a marginal village into the capital of Risaralda and a center of the Eje Cafetero. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The third vertex of the Coffee Region: land of the Quimbaya and the Embera-Chamí, settled by the Antioquian colonisation, part of the Coffee Cultural Landscape, home of Pereira — the 'Pearl of the Otún' — of the hot springs of Santa Rosa de Cabal, and of a natural range that climbs from the Cauca valley to the snow peaks and drops into the rainforests of the Chocó.
Read the history of Risaralda →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Pereira actually begins long before its founding, with the city of Cartago. In 1540, during the conquest, the Spanish founded Cartago in these lands of the Otún basin. But at the end of the 17th century, for various reasons (problems with Indigenous peoples, and reasons of trade and communications), the city of Cartago was moved to the site it occupies today, further south, on the banks of the La Vieja river. The original site was abandoned and became known from then on as 'Cartago Viejo': a place swallowed by forest, with the ruins of the old colonial town.
For more than a century and a half those lands remained almost unpopulated. During the independence period, the patriot Francisco Pereira Martínez took refuge on land he owned among the ruins of Cartago Viejo. In time, he expressed the wish that a settlement should one day rise there. That wish would be the seed of the future Pereira.
Pereira was formally founded on 30 August 1863. The date is bound to a moving story: a few days earlier, on 20 August 1863, Francisco Pereira Martínez died. Honoring his wish that a settlement be born on those lands, Father Remigio Antonio Cañarte led a caravan of settlers that set out from Cartago toward the ruins of Cartago Viejo. There, on the old colonial site, the founding mass was celebrated and the establishment of the new town formalized, on what is today the Plaza de Bolívar (at the corner of Calle 19 and Carrera Octava).
The town took the name Pereira in honor of Francisco Pereira Martínez, the patriot who had dreamed of that settlement. And so the city was born of a singular mixture: the will of a patriot, the drive of a group of people from Cartago and Cauca led by a priest, and the setting of colonial ruins reclaimed by the forest. That double root (the formal founding of Cauca origin and the colonizing force coming from the north) marks the whole identity of Pereira.
Although the formal initiative for the founding came from a group of Cauca origin, the true engine of Pereira's growth was the Antioquian colonization, the great movement of peasant families who through the 19th century came down from southern Antioquia, opening up the mountains with axe and machete in search of new land. That colonizing current populated the whole Eje Cafetero and gave Pereira much of its population, its culture and its hardworking, civic character.
The crop that changed the region's destiny was coffee. The mild, humid slopes of these mountains proved ideal for the bean, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries coffee turned Pereira and its neighbors into a prosperous economic pole. The city grew fast, filled with commerce and drive, and went from a marginal village in the north of the old State of Cauca to a first-rank urban center. That commercial vigor remains, to this day, one of Pereira's hallmarks.
For much of its history, Pereira belonged administratively to other departments (first Cauca and later Caldas). But its sustained growth, its population and its economic drive gradually consolidated a strong sense of its own identity. In 1967 the department of Risaralda was created, separated from Caldas, and Pereira was designated its capital. That milestone crowned the transformation of the old coffee town into a genuine city-region, head of its own department and of a metropolitan area that brings together Pereira, Dosquebradas and La Virginia.
Since then, Pereira has established itself as one of the most dynamic urban centers in western Colombia: a hub of trade, services, universities and connections, with Matecaña airport (opened to the public in 1947) as the region's gateway by air. The city, known as the 'Pearl of the Otún' or 'the beloved, night-owl, dark-haired one', keeps the enterprising, open spirit left to it by its founders and settlers.
No image sums up Pereira's character better than its most famous and controversial monument: the Bolívar Desnudo. In 1963, to mark the city's centenary, a bronze sculpture of the Liberator was unveiled in the Plaza de Bolívar that broke every convention. Instead of the solemn, uniformed, medal-covered hero who presides over almost every square in Colombia, the Antioquian sculptor Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt sculpted a completely naked Bolívar, mounted on a horse at full gallop, torch raised and body wrapped in bronze flames, with no sword and no decorations.
The artist's idea was to depict Bolívar not as a stiff historical figure but as an elemental force: fire, movement and freedom stripped of everything superfluous. The work scandalized a good part of the society of Pereira and of Colombia at the time, unprepared to see the Liberator without clothes; there were protests and controversy. But in time that very audacity turned the monument into the city's most recognizable emblem and one of the most celebrated public sculptures in the country.
Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, considered one of the great Latin American sculptors of the 20th century, left his mark all over the Eje Cafetero: the imposing Bolívar Cóndor in Manizales, another monumental reinterpretation of the Liberator, is also his. That the coffee-country 'City of Surprises' identifies with a naked, flaming Bolívar says a great deal about its spirit: modern, commercial, a touch irreverent and proud to stand apart. Today the question 'why is Pereira's Bolívar naked?' is one of the curiosities that most draws visitors to its Plaza de Bolívar.
In 2011, UNESCO declared the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia a World Heritage Site, a recognition covering areas of Risaralda, Caldas, Quindío and northern Valle del Cauca. The listing honors not only the coffee planted on steep hillsides but the whole culture, architecture, food and way of life that the Antioquian colonization and coffee growing created in these mountains over more than a century.
Pereira, as capital of Risaralda and one of the great cities of that region, is fully part of that heritage landscape. Today it combines its coffee inheritance with a modern, commercial urban profile, and has become an ideal base for tourism in the Eje Cafetero: from the city you can easily reach volcanic hot springs, bird reserves, coffee farms and postcard towns. The story that began among the ruins of Cartago Viejo leads, a century and a half later, to a city proud of its past and of a landscape recognized by the world.