[FILO]

The good times, however, did not last and by this decade, coffee prices had tumbled to less than 50 cents a pound, half of coffee's value from the late 1990s (the price of coffee is now back up to $1.30 a pound). Farmers here turned to bananas, macadamia nuts and berries. And they also turned to tourism, realizing that their haciendas could easily double as bed-and-breakfast inns.

One of the haciendas, El Balso, belongs to Julian Morales de la Pava and his wife, Sara Espinosa. A century-old two-story farmhouse with five guest rooms on 27 acres outside of Armenia, Quindio's capital, it is painted red and white, with blue trim.

The big veranda is filled with old leather chairs, a hammock and tables. The rooms are outfitted with antique brass beds and mahogany dressers. There is no glass in the windows, just wooden shutters that, when open, overlook a luxuriant garden of mango and guayaba trees. In the distance is a small, well-kept pool.

"You just don't even want to turn the radio on," says Octavio Largo, a retired university professor, who goes there for the tranquility, the light breeze coming off the mountains, the multicolored gardens. El Balso's other key attraction is that it continues to churn out coffee for export.

"This is my life," Morales de la Pava, 69, explains as he leads me out into the field for an instructive tour. "It's what my father did, what my grandfather did."

Such tours are full of the unexpected, since each farm has its own ways of collecting and preparing coffee for market. Each farm, too, serves coffee. But visitors should not expect coffee tastings or even very good coffee, for that matter. The paradox about Colombia is that while it is known worldwide for the quality of its coffee beans, outside of a few choice restaurants in big cities, Colombians have yet to master the art of making a good cup of coffee. What you usually get is a very light cup, too soft on the coffee to offer much taste. In coffee country, there are no espresso machines or baristas.

At Morales de la Pava's farm, Marinela Rojas Martinez, the young, energetic housekeeper, cooks up a plentiful breakfast of scrambled eggs with onions and tomatoes, what Colombians called pericos, along with cornmeal arepas, fresh-squeezed juice and bread. But there is no lunch or dinner. I wander over to the Fonda Mirador, a short drive away, for lunch. An expansive, rustic restaurant built of bamboo, the Fonda offers a stunning view of five tall Andean peaks. In Colombia, as in Argentina, steak is king, and here the cook specializes in succulent cuts, served with rice and beans, avocado and plantains.At one of the several restaurants in the valley, you can order up the brook trout famous in Salento's foothills.

Getting around coffee country is easy. Inn owners themselves often offer to drive visitors to nearby towns, or to see the sights. Innkeepers can also call local cabbies, who charge about $6 an hour to take visitors on tours or drive them to local attractions, which range from horseback rides into the countryside to whitewater rafting on the region's many rivers.

My driver, Francisco Ruiz, 34, tools on Quindio's narrow roads while offering hotel and dining suggestions and remarking on the region's rich history. One key stop on his tour is the Coffee Park, outside Montenegro. The Coffee Park's carefully tended 128 acres are dedicated to coffee and other native plants, and feature a train, a museum and a cable car.

Luxury is not expensive

Still, for most people the central attraction is the accommodations themselves. They range from backpacking havens to sprawling all-inclusive resort hotels to the historic haciendas. Nothing is expensive, with even the best haciendas costing less than $50 a night.

One of the most lively and cheapest I came across was the Plantation House, a five-room hotel run by a former British businessman in Salento. Built on a bluff and painted green and yellow, the inn is postcard pretty. Coffee plants grow in a garden, along with oranges and lemons, giving off a pleasant fragrance.

The day I arrived at this 120-year-old restored plantation, the porticos and rooms were teeming with mountain bikers. In the kitchen, I found two young foreigners, David Botzer, 29, an Israeli computer programmer, and Peter Meek, 24, a mechanical engineer from New Zealand. Colombia had been an afterthought for them, mysterious and risky. But both said they found the spectacularly rugged coffee country to be safe and the people courteous.

The most fanciful place I found was the 119-year-old Finca la Cabana, outside the town of Calarca. Hugging the farmhouse are rows and rows of coffee plants that, along with banana and other fruit trees, form a 321-acre farm. With seven rooms, the hacienda may sound small, but it sprawls.

Its owners, the Sierra family, have used every nook and cranny to house an array of artifacts that evoke the elegant life the coffee gentry enjoyed until a couple of decades ago. Rooms are decorated with old religious engravings, black-and-white photographs of past occupants, ceramic statuettes and musty books. A sitting room features Art Deco furniture and old hats and furs.

The wall of La Cabana's bar is cluttered with engravings of matadors, posters of 19th century damsels and mariachi hats. Its caretaker, Dona Ernestina, fawns over guests, offering hearty meals cooked in a 100-year-old wood stove and steady refills of fresh-squeezed juice.

"It's got a little pool, but that's not what you go for," says Chris Marshall, an Englishman who has lived in Colombia for two years. "You go for the atmosphere, you go for the history."

Back in Salento, I choose to stay in another old hacienda, the Alto del Colonel, loosely translated to mean the Colonel's Perch. From its wraparound porch, cluttered with antique furniture, I can see an exuberant valley and the verdant mountains that enclose Salento. Classical music wafts from a stereo, and I can hear children playing in the streets below.