Before the Parade: Dawn on the Silletero Flower Farms Above Medellín

The silleta hits the silletero's back at around 4:30 a.m., long before anyone in Medellín's Poblado district has ordered their first café con leche. Up in Santa Elena — thirty minutes east of the city by car, though the road climbs so steeply it feels like an hour — the farms that supply the Feria de las Flores parade are already lit by bare bulbs and headlamps. Farmers sort chrysanthemums, birds of paradise, and agapanthus into color blocks, testing arrangements they've been sketching since April.

I went up to Santa Elena in late July 2023, a week before the desfile. The air at 2,500 meters was thin and cold enough that I regretted not bringing a proper jacket. What I didn't regret was setting my alarm for 3 a.m. — because by 7, the tour buses start arriving, and then the farms belong to everyone except the people who work them.

1. What a silletero actually is (and isn't)

The word comes from silleta, a wooden frame carried on the back, originally used to haul goods — and sometimes people — up Andean trails before roads existed. Silleteros today are flower farmers, almost all from the veredas around Santa Elena, who build elaborate floral arrangements on those frames for the annual parade. The craft passes through families. Some lineages go back four or five generations.

Outside Colombia, the silleteros tend to get flattened into a feel-good photo op: old man, big smile, enormous flower display. That framing misses the economics. Growing commercial flowers at altitude is precarious work. Many silletero families supplement farm income with construction jobs in Medellín or small-scale tourism. The parade brings visibility but not necessarily stability.

A detail that stuck with me: one farmer, Hernando, pointed to a row of hydrangeas he'd planted specifically to sell to event florists in El Poblado. The parade flowers are different — those come from older, less commercially viable varieties he keeps because his grandmother grew them.

2. Getting to the farms before dawn

From central Medellín, you have two real options. Drive yourself (or hire a driver) via the road to Santa Elena from the Oriente tunnel interchange — budget COP $80,000–$120,000 each way for a taxi arranged the night before. Or take the Metrocable to Santo Domingo and then a shared colectivo toward Santa Elena, though those don't run before 5 a.m., which defeats the purpose.

Drive. Seriously.

The farms aren't clustered in one convenient spot. Vereda Barro Blanco and Vereda El Plan are where several of the best-known silletero families work, but access is through unmarked dirt roads. A local contact makes the difference between wandering past locked gates and sitting in someone's kitchen drinking aguapanela while they explain why gladioli are harder to work with than roses.

3. Skip the Parque de los Silleteros on parade day

I know. It sounds like heresy. But the Parque Arví area on parade day is a logistical disaster — overcrowded Metrocable cars, COP $15,000 bottled waters, and so many selfie sticks that you can't actually see the silletas being assembled. The parade route along Carrera 70 in Medellín proper, where the silleteros walk — go there instead.

Visit the farms a few days before the parade, when the arrangement-building is happening in real time. Farmers test the weight distribution of a silleta that can weigh 60 to 75 kilograms. They make last-minute swaps — a cascade of yellow calla lilies for white ones because the yellow batch opened too early in the heat. This is where the actual craft lives.

The parade itself, along Carrera 70 between Calle 44 and the Estadio, is worth seeing once. Arrive by 7 a.m. and stake out a spot near Calle 48 where the route curves and the silleteros slow down. By 10 a.m. the street is shoulder-to-shoulder and you'll see more phone screens than flowers.

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4. What's growing and when it matters

The Feria de las Flores happens in late July or early August, pinned loosely to the first week of August. But the growing calendar starts months earlier. Chrysanthemums need about 14 weeks from cutting to bloom. Birds of paradise are slower. The agapanthus that gives many silletas their signature blue-purple base? Those are practically perennial — the same plants, producing year after year, tended like family members.

Flower farming at this altitude means constant negotiation with weather. Santa Elena gets heavy afternoon rain from April through November. Farmers use simple plastic-sheeting greenhouses — nothing like the industrial Dutch-style operations in the Sabana de Bogotá. Everything here is smaller, more manual.

One row of roses, six rows of pompón chrysanthemums, a patch of heliconias near the stream where the soil stays wet. That was Hernando's layout. Not a grand operation. Enough.

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5. Eating in Santa Elena at farmer hours

Restaurant options near the farms are limited before 8 a.m., which is exactly when you'll be hungry. Eat where the farmers eat: roadside tiendas serving calentado — reheated rice and beans with a fried egg, a piece of chicharrón, and an arepa. There's a tienda on the road between Barro Blanco and the main Santa Elena junction, no sign, just a Coca-Cola awning and a woman named Doña Gloria who starts cooking at 4 a.m. Calentado runs COP $8,000–$12,000.

Skip the sit-down restaurants near Parque Arví unless you're there after 10 a.m. and want trout. The trout is fine. It's always fine. Competent, unmemorable, interchangeable with every other altitude-restaurant trout in Antioquia. You didn't come up a mountain at dawn for that.

Aguapanela with lime — that's the drink. Sugarcane water, served hot at that hour. It does more for cold hands and altitude fatigue than any espresso.