foot-hills
of the Andes, in altitudes from 3,500 to 4,500 feet above sea level.

[Illustration: THE CONDUCTING SLUICEWAY AT GUATAPARA

The running water carries the picked coffee berries to pulpers and
washing tanks]

[Illustration: COFFEE PICKING AND FIELD TRANSPORT]

[Illustration: COFFEE CULTURE IN SAO PAULO, BRAZIL]

[Illustration: A NEAR VIEW OF A HEAVILY LADEN COFFEE TREE ON A BOGOTA
PLANTATION]

[Illustration: PICKING COFFEE ON A BOGOTA PLANTATION]

Methods of planting, cultivation, gathering, and preparing the Colombian
coffee crop for the market are substantially those that are common in
all coffee-producing countries, although they differ in some small
particulars. About 700 trees are usually planted to the acre, and native
trees furnish the necessary shade. The average yield is one pound per
tree per year.

While _Coffea arabica_ has been mostly cultivated in Colombia, as in the
other countries of South America, the _liberica_ variety has not been
neglected. Seeds of the _liberica_ tree were planted here soon after
1880, and were moderately successful. Since 1900, more attention has
been given to _liberica_, and attempts have been made to grow it upon
banana and rubber plantations, which seem to provide all the shade
protection that is needed. _Liberica_ coffee trees begin to bear in
their third year. From the fifth year, when a crop of about 650 pounds
to the acre can reasonably be expected, the productiveness steadily
increases until after fifteen or sixteen years, when a maximum of over
one thousand pounds an acre is attained.

Antioquia is the largest coffee producing department in the republic,
and its coffee is of the highest grade grown. Medellin, the capital,
where the business interests of the industry are concentrated, is a
handsome white city located on the banks of the Aburra river, in a
picturesque valley that is overlooked by the high peaks of the Andean
range. It is a town of about 80,000 inhabitants, thriving as a
manufacturing center, abundant in modern improvements, and is the center
of a coffee production of 500,000 bags known in the market as Medellin
and Manizales. Another center in this coffee region is the town of
Manizales, perched on the crest of the Andean spurs to dominate the
valley extending to Medellin and the Cauca valley to the Pacific.
There-about many small coffee growers are settled, and several hundred
thousand bags of the beans pass through annually.

One of