In the 1800s Father Francisco Romero of Salazar de las Palmas handed confessing parishioners a task in place of prayers: plant coffee trees. That penance helped spread the crop through Santander, Cundinamarca, and Antioquia, though coffee had reached Colombia around 1790 and Jesuit José Gumilla noted it in 1730 at a mission near the Meta and Orinoco rivers. The first recorded export, just 100 bags, left from Cúcuta in 1808. Big estate owners chased tobacco, quinine, and cattle instead, and the Thousand Days War of 1899 to 1902 plus crushing foreign debt ruined them.

Their collapse opened the frontier. In the Antioquian colonization, families moved into Caldas, Valle, and Tolima, won land titles for working public land, and grew coffee on steep slopes alongside corn, beans, and yucca. Exports hit 1 million bags in 1913 and 3 million by 1930. Growers formed the National Federation of Coffee Growers in 1927 and the research institute Cenicafé in 1938, and in 1981 hired Doyle Dane Bernbach, which created Juan Valdez and his mule Conchita as an ingredient brand. When warming and heavy rain let leaf rust climb the Andes and cut output from 12 to 9 million bags between 2006 and 2010, Cenicafé bred the rust resistant Castillo variety and production reached 14.2 million bags by 2018.

• Archbishop Viceroy Caballero y Góngora reported coffee growing in the northeast in 1787.
• The Juan Valdez ads that began airing in 1983 explained volcanic soil, altitude, and hand picking of ripe cherries.
• The National Coffee Park in Quindío opened in 1995 with gondolas and a roller coaster, drawing over a million visitors a year.
• Colombian coffee won EU protected origin status in 2007, and the coffee axis of Caldas, Quindío, and Risaralda became a UNESCO site in 2011.
• Arhuaco growers of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta bought and sold land titles and farmed high altitude organic coffee on their own terms.