Seeing Slowly: A Journey Through Colombia’s Eje Cafetero

Deana Kotiga is an anthropologist, documentary photographer and writer whose work is rooted in over a decade of studying human behaviour. Her focus lies in the everyday — in how people move through the world, how they interact with their environments and each other, and how meaning is made in moments we often overlook. Bridging academic research with creative practice, her camera isn’t drawn to spectacle, but to stillness — to the quiet details that speak volumes about a place. In her four part series, Seeing Slowly, for Something Curated, Kotiga explores the meeting point of travel, visual anthropology and storytelling.

I didn’t want to go.

In my memory, Colombia was still beaches and cocktails, a place of late nights and Caribbean fun. Mountains and coffee valleys didn’t fit the picture. But Jose, my partner, who had grown up in Colombia, insisted. You’ll love it, Deana. He was right.

The beauty was immediate, overwhelming. Hills rolled into each other like waves, every ridge a different green. From our hotel balcony the landscape seemed almost simulated, a rendering too precise to be real. Towns glowed in colour: balconies painted fuchsia, cobalt, lime; doors flung open onto plazas full of noise and light. It was no surprise to learn that these places, Salento and Filandia, had helped inspire Encanto. The palette was cinematic, almost cartoon in its brightness. The everyday here looked borrowed from a fairytale.

But beneath the surface, the story was more precarious.

At a small coffee farm outside Salento, the farmer explained that for two years the cherries had failed to turn red. Rainfall came at the wrong times, heat lingered too long. Climate change was no longer a distant threat but a daily fact, unravelling that which had sustained generations. Tourism had become essential: visitors like us walking the rows, tasting beans, hearing stories. These tours helped families hold on, even as global markets demanded uniformity and yield.

He told us about the roasting, too. Good coffee, we learnt, should never be burnt. The idea of flavour is lost when the bean is roasted dark; all nuance is flattened into bitterness. Lighter roasting keeps the complexity alive, the florals, the citrus, the soft sweetness. What remains is taste, not the jitter of stimulation. In Europe, coffee is roasted hard, extracted strong, caffeinated to the point of aggression. We overdo it, as we so often do. The irony was clear. Colombia exports its best beans abroad, leaving locals with what remains. A quieter form of colonialism persists, written into coffee itself: who gets the best, who drinks the leftovers…

Hiking the valleys, the contrasts sharpened. On the way to a hummingbird sanctuary, I heard a low vibration behind Jose and froze. For a second I thought it was a jaguar. It was a hummingbird, wings slicing the air so close I felt the shift. A moment of fear, instantly overturned by wonder – much like the region itself.

Eje Cafetero dazzles at first sight. It is a landscape that seduces quickly, that asks little to enchant. But to stay, to look closely, is to see something else: a region at the frontline of climate change, tethered to global demand, sustained by fragile adaptations. The painted doors, the cinematic hillsides, the fairytale surface – all of it holds another story, quieter and more complicated. To really see Eje Cafetero is to see both at once – the instant magic and the fragile reality beneath it.

Photography by Deana Kotiga