The Largest Coffee Cup in Colombia

Cocaine once reigned. But coffee is the king again in Colombia. And as many international tourists are making their way back to the more remote parts of this majestic South American country, the image of Juan Valdez, the “face” of the Colombia coffee grower, is who they want you to remember. Not Pablo Escobar, the face of a Narco industry which fueled a different kind of agriculture which tore this country apart for decades.

In fact, coffee tourism has become THE THING to do in Colombia now. Why? Well, it’s safe to go to the interior of Colombia where small family farms are located but were once riddled with fighting fractions on the left, the military and those just trying to protect their land from narco-trade.  

In towns in and around Chinchina, Colombia many small family farms which struggled  to survive over the last 30 years are seeing a resurgence of business by opening up their “Fincas,” or plantations/farms to tourists with a full-blown lesson of the production of coffee, a tasting, followed by the visitor getting to pick coffee beans just like the workers on the property.  Your beans go into the Colombian “Collectivo,” for coffee production and some farms will even give you a certificate from the Colombian government showing your contribution to the coffee industry. 

So proud are the Colombians of this economic stimilant to the region, that in the center of the coffee region they have erected what was at one time the world’s largest coffee mug. It is located at the Parque Principal in Chinchina.  

The cup was unveiled for a Guinness Book of Records stunt in June 2019 to fill it with it with the largest cup of coffee in history.  They were successful with 22,739.14 litres (5,001.91 UK gal; 6,007.04 US gal).  Since it took fifty people and more than a month to construct the project, the cup remains in the plaza for all to behold. (In 2022, a larger cup was unveiled in Leon, Mexico.)

Colombians will admit they are not the largest coffee producers in the world. And their coffee isn’t the strongest. They don’t fetch the highest price on the market for their coffee either. But now that the aggressive years of left- and right-wing fighting seems to be behind them, Colombians may be the proudest of their coffee production. And they have one of the largest coffee cups in the world to prove it now.