Cocora Valley: The Tallest Palm Trees on the Planet

Written byJeff SoriaJeff is a...4 min read

Where the Cocora Valley wax palms grow

Valle de Cocora sits in the department of Quindío, in Colombia’s Central Andes, about 24 kilometers northeast of Armenia and a short ride from the colonial town of Salento. The valley floor runs between roughly 1,800 and 2,400 meters above sea level, in the humid cloud-forest belt where the mountains are green year-round and the mist rolls in most afternoons. The name comes from Quimbaya legend: Cocora was a princess, daughter of the chief Acaime, and her name is usually translated as “star of water.”

The tree everyone comes for is Ceroxylon quindiuense, the Quindío wax palm. It is endemic to the northern Andes — Colombia and a sliver of northern Peru — and it thrives at altitudes between 2,000 and 3,000 meters, higher than almost any other palm on the planet. It also can’t handle sustained heat much above 20°C, which is precisely why you can’t grow a forest of these anywhere warm and sunny. The valley isn’t a backdrop that happens to have palms in it. It’s one of the few places on Earth these palms can exist at all.

The name comes from the trunk: a smooth, pale column coated in a natural white wax, ringed with dark scars where old fronds fell away. That wax is also the reason the species almost didn’t make it.

The tradition that nearly killed them

Through the nineteenth century, wax palms were cut down so the coating on their trunks could be rendered into candles. That alone was destructive, but the bigger problem came every Holy Week. For Palm Sunday, communities across the Andes harvested wax palm fronds — and the easiest fronds to reach were on young palms, which died once their crowns were stripped. Generation after generation of seedlings was removed before it could ever mature. Cattle grazing in the valley finished the job by trampling whatever regeneration was left.

The math is brutal when you understand how slowly this species lives. A wax palm takes around 80 years to reach reproductive maturity and can live well past 200. A tradition that kills the young ones doesn’t show its damage for decades — and by the time it does, there’s no quick fix.

On 16 September 1985, Colombia’s Congress passed Law 61, declaring the wax palm the national tree. The law banned felling it outright, with a fine convertible into arrest, and authorized the government to buy land in the Central Cordillera to protect the species in its own habitat. That same year, Cocora Valley was incorporated into Los Nevados National Natural Park. Campaigns pushed churches toward alternative fronds for Palm Sunday, and the practice collapsed within a generation.

The parrot that lives in them

Conservationists had a second argument, and it turned out to be the persuasive one: the yellow-eared parrot (Ognorhynchus icterotis) nests almost exclusively in wax palm trunks. By the late 1990s it had all but vanished, until a small surviving population was found in Tolima and became the focus of a long recovery effort. Save the palm and you save the parrot — a link that made the abstract case for a tree suddenly concrete.

The work continues. In August 2026, Colombia declared the Palmares de Tochecito Flora Sanctuary in Tolima, protecting 1,964 hectares in a landscape estimated to hold close to 300,000 adult wax palms — over 70% of the country’s recorded population, and the largest known concentration of the species anywhere.

Seeing them for yourself

Salento is the base. Colorful Willys jeeps leave from Plaza de Bolívar, the main square, starting around 6:30 a.m., and the ride to the trailhead takes 25 to 30 minutes on a narrow mountain road — the jeeps go when they fill, not strictly by the posted schedule.

From the drop-off you have two realistic options. The short walk out to the palm viewpoints takes one to two hours round trip and delivers the classic image. The full loop runs about 12 kilometers and takes five to six hours, climbing through cloud forest, crossing suspension bridges over the Quindío River, topping out near Finca La Montaña before descending into the palm forest at the end. Most hikers do it counter-clockwise so the palms are the reward rather than the opening act. A detour to Acaime, a hummingbird house where a hot drink comes with the entrance, adds roughly two hours.

Three practical things. The trail crosses several private farms that each collect their own cash fee, and there’s no ATM at the trailhead — withdraw pesos in Salento. Rain and fog are near-guaranteed after midday, so start early and expect mud; rented rubber boots are common for a reason. And if you’d rather not hike, horseback rides through the valley floor are a genuinely good alternative. December to February and June to August are the driest stretches, and weekdays are far quieter than Colombian holiday weekends.