Susan and I started debating our travel philosophy before we even left Singapore. She was very much in favour of spending at least a month at a time in each place, booking everything well in advance, and I was more inclined towards long meandering journeys where we didn’t plan too far in advance but went wherever we felt at the time. By the time we arrived in Medellín, we’d not stayed in any one place for more than five nights in a row since Lima, unless you count being on a boat in the Galápagos for a week, and were definitely ready to stop moving around for a while.

La Casa Grande is a stunningly lovely place, nestled up in the hills above Medellín. The main building dates back to 1853, when it sat at the heart of an enormous coffee-growing finca. Coffee is still grown in the fields nearby, albeit on a much smaller scale. The top floor provides accommodation for visiting artists, and downstairs there’s a pottery studio, Don Carlos’ offices, and a tasting room for their excellent coffee tours.

For us, it was a wonderful place to rest and recuperate. We would get up in the morning for breakfast, do some work (Susan drew; I mostly worked on this travelogue, writing all the posts that came out in March), have lunch, and then do some more work, read, or just go for a walk. We hardly left the grounds for the three weeks we were there, except to go shopping once a week to buy stuff to cook dinner with, and once to go in to Medellín proper to see some museums. They helped us to organise a taxi for these trips: it’s about 25 minutes to get in to town down an incredibly steep little road, and slightly longer to come back up the main highway. There isn’t a formal one-way system on the road that the hacienda’s on, but I’m not surprised that nobody wants to drive up the slope.

Breakfast and lunch was cooked for us every day, and we smothered everything with Don Carlos’ red onion relish. He refused to share the recipe, but I think it’s just sliced red onions in a mixture of neutral oil, lime juice, “Italian herbs”, salt, and garlic powder. I’ll try to figure out an actual recipe when I’m back in a kitchen.

Here’s a nice article about La Casa Grande in the Bogotá Post.