What happened on August 10
On August 10, early in the morning, the earth shook hard across these mountains. It lasted only seconds.
When I went out to walk the farm, everything seemed to be in its place. The houses we've always had (La Conejera, Santa Chila, El Guatín, La Leonera and the passion fruit house) were still standing, looking out over the coffee trees the way they have for generations. A couple of slipped roof tiles, nothing more, I thought.
But the earth keeps its secrets down below, where you can't see. The family's architect went through the houses carefully, and the diagnosis was clear: the blow didn't go to the walls, it went to the foundations. From the outside they look fine. Inside, deep down, they need to be raised again.
These aren't just any houses. They are traditional coffee-growing architecture, the kind UNESCO recognized as part of the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia, a World Heritage Site. That's why we don't want to patch them up and move on: we want to rebuild them properly, from the ground up, the way they used to be built. So they last another century.
Meanwhile, life among the coffee trees hasn't stopped. The birds still sing at dawn, the harvest goes on, and the specialty coffee keeps coming out as good as ever.
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La Conejera
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Santa Chila
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La Leonera
