The Cocora Valley is a fold of cold green hills above 2,000 metres in the coffee country of the Colombian Andes, and standing on them, each one alone against the sky, are the tallest palms on Earth. A wax palm reaches close to sixty metres. Almost every other palm is a lowland tropical tree. This one lives in cold Andean cloud forest as high as 3,000 metres, and the pale wax sheathing its slender trunk is part of how it survives the cold. Settlers scraped that wax off for candles and soap and felled the rot-resistant trunks for fence posts. They keep their own time too, taking around eighty years to flower and living well past a century. The open lower valley is working ranchland, where herders on horseback move cattle between the trunks. That grazing keeps the hills bare and the palms so visible, and it is quietly the reason hardly any young ones ever take root.
The loop from the village of Salento runs about eleven kilometres and most of a day. It drops off the pasture into dripping cloud forest and crosses the Quindío River on narrow plank-and-cable bridges that sway under your feet. Then it climbs to the Acaime reserve, where hummingbirds swarm the feeders and the mud runs deepest. After that comes the ridge, and the palms show themselves in hundreds, sixty-metre trunks reduced to stubble on bare green hills. At first light cloud still fills the basin and you see them only as dark shapes, then the hills surface one ridge at a time as it thins. Down among them you stand at the foot of one and look straight up the white trunk to a burst of fronds sixty metres over your head. They are also the only tree the yellow-eared parrot will nest in; as they fell the bird was thought extinct, until about eighty turned up in 1999. For generations Colombians cut young fronds to carry on Palm Sunday, stripping the very seedlings this valley needed, until in 2003 the Church asked the faithful to carry something else.