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Manizales is the capital of Caldas Department, founded on 12 October 1849 by Antioquian settlers on a steep ridge of the Central Cordillera of the Andes, near the Nevado del Ruiz volcano. A city of about 475,000 people, it is a center of the Colombian coffee industry and one of the country's main university cities, and its countryside is part of the UNESCO Coffee Cultural Landscape.
Its steep streets climb between the neo-Gothic cathedral on the Plaza de Bolívar, the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception and the hilltop district of Chipre, while cable cars glide over the hillside barrios. The city is known for the Feria de Manizales each January and its international theatre festival. On 10 August 2026 a magnitude 7.4 earthquake centered in Chocó killed several people in Manizales and badly damaged the cathedral, so check the status of sights before visiting.
Beyond the city, cloud forest reserves such as Río Blanco shelter hummingbirds, coffee farms and towns spread across the valleys, and early morning tours climb to the glaciers and páramo of Los Nevados National Park.
The Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary faces the Plaza de Bolívar in Manizales, a neo-Gothic church designed by the French architect Julien Polti that rises about 117 meters, the tallest in Colombia. The August 2026 earthquake badly damaged its dome and a tower, so check if it is open.
Plaza de Bolívar de Manizales is the main square of the city, set between the cathedral to the south and the Caldas government palace to the north. At its center stands the Bolívar Cóndor, a bronze by Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt unveiled in 1991, and two ceramic murals by Guillermo Botero decorate it.
The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception stands on Parque Caldas in Manizales, its first stone laid in 1903 to plans by the Jesuit architect Santiago Páramo. The neo-Gothic church is built of bahareque with guadua and sawn timber behind a metal-clad front, and its interior is carved in cedar.
The Torre de Herveo is a wooden tower in Manizales that once carried the Manizales to Mariquita aerial cableway over a deep ravine in Herveo, Tolima. It was built of local timber after the steel tower ordered from England was sunk by a German submarine, and it was moved to the city in the 1980s.
The Monumento a los Colonizadores in the Chipre district of Manizales is about 50 tonnes of bronze cast from 1997 to 2002 by Luis Guillermo Vallejo from keys and metal donated by residents. Settlers and oxen struggle across the mountains below, while above them a mother lifts her child in triumph.
Chipre is one of the oldest districts of Manizales, in the west of the city where the first Antioquian settlers made their homes in the 1840s. Its boulevard is the favourite spot for the city's famous sunsets, and its Church of Our Lady of the Rosary copies the old cathedral lost in the 1926 fire.
The Cable Aéreo de Manizales is an aerial cable car with three lines in the city's public transport system, giving bird's-eye views of the hillside barrios and of neighboring Villamaría. It follows a long tradition, as the Manizales to Mariquita cableway of 71.8 kilometers ran from 1915 to 1968.
Ecoparque Los Yarumos is a 53 hectare patch of humid forest inside Manizales, named after the yarumo tree, with trails, viewpoints over the city and a cable car station. It offers canopy lines, a Tibetan bridge and a climbing wall, and the Bioma interactive science center opened there in 2015.
The Recinto del Pensamiento is a 179 hectare nature park on the edge of Manizales, most of it a protected forest reserve. Visitors follow ecological trails through an orchid forest, a butterfly observatory, an aromatic herb garden and a bird viewpoint, and a chairlift climbs the green slopes.
The Río Blanco Reserve lies in Río Blanco, the largest and least populated of the seven rural districts of Manizales, bordering Villamaría, Neira and Marulanda. Its protected forests guard water sources for the area and are home to many birds, including migratory species, along with forest mammals.
Nevado del Ruiz is a glacier-capped volcano rising to 5,321 meters on the border of Caldas and Tolima in Los Nevados National Park, among the highest in Colombia. Its eruption of 13 November 1985 sent lahars that buried the town of Armero, and its glaciers have shrunk fast in recent decades.
Chinchiná is a coffee town 18 kilometers from Manizales, founded in 1857 by Antioquian settlers, whose name means river of gold in the Quimbaya language. It has some of the most technified coffee farms in Colombia and Buencafé, one of the largest freeze-dried coffee plants in the world.
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