Flower culture high above Medellin

                                                                     

Making the silleta

                 View of Medellin from Santa Elena

High above Medellin is the mountain-top area of Santa Elena, a lovely area of flower farms, villages and tiny churches.  Many of the local farmers are descendants of Basque immigrants.  We visited one family farm to see how flower cultivation and marketing developed and enjoyed meeting the English-speaking Basque farmer (also a high school guidance counsellor) and his family.

When the Spaniards first came to this part of Colombia, they developed the salt and gold trade along routes that went from valley to valley across the high mountains.  Not liking to overexert themselves, they forced the Indians to carry them on their backs on wooden sillas (chairs), an example of which you can see on one of the accompanying photo pages.  Later, when flower cultivation took over the mountain economy, the farmers adapted the sillas to carry their flowers, which they then took to market in Medellin via slippery trails down the very steep mountainsides.  In the photo above, Ignacio is making the silleta (the chair that carries flowers) by stuffing bunches of flowers into a multi-colored display.  Now, of course, the flowers are trucked to markets in Medellin and Bogota and flown to global markets.

Ignacio's parents-in-law have 8 children, all of whom have professional degrees from Medellin universities.  All of them have also built houses on the farm, so there is a colorful cluster of homes, each distinct, housing the multitude of children and grandchildren.

An important festival has emerged from this culture of flower farming, so all the Santa Elena families  now spend weeks each spring making large displays of flowers around a particular theme in order to compete in the festival.  Ignacio's family worked on theirs for over a month and added the unique feature of movable parts of the display that could be operated by hand--such as an oxcart full of flowers that could be moved forwards and backwards.  While his mother-in-law served us mint tea from their garden, Ignacio proudly showed us the many ribbons the family had won for their displays.

We stopped later for a snack of thick tortillas and cheese with a sweet hot drink made from lumps of sugar cane.  The tortillas can be made with cheese, from refined corn flour, from coarse corn flour, from corn flour mixed with charcoal to give it a distinctive color and flavor or corn flour mixed with sugar cane--all delicious.

I'll be posting photos on another page or 2.