The Silletero's Daughters: A New Generation Tends Medellín's Flower Farms

The first time I watched a silletero hoist a silleta — a wooden frame holding maybe sixty pounds of flowers — onto his back and walk downhill without complaint, I understood something about Medellín that the metro system and the graffiti tours never taught me. The flower farmers of Santa Elena, the corregimiento perched above the city at roughly 2,500 meters, have been carrying arrangements down to the valley for trade since the nineteenth century. Every August, during the Feria de las Flores, that labor becomes spectacle: a parade of maybe 500 silletas through the streets.

But here's what the parade doesn't show you. The daily work. The 4 a.m. harvests. The fact that many of the silleteros now passing the tradition forward are women — daughters and granddaughters who are rethinking what the farms produce, how they sell it, and who gets credit. The parade lasts a day. The farms run year-round.

1. Santa Elena isn't a museum piece

Most Medellín visitors who make it to Santa Elena do the Parque Arví route: take the Metrocable from Santo Domingo to the gondola, ride it over a canopy of pines and eucalyptus, walk a trail, buy a bag of arequipe, come back. That's fine. But if you stop there, you've basically visited the gift shop of a culture without entering the building.

The actual flower farms — the fincas — are scattered along the roads that branch off from the vereda central. A handful now accept visitors by appointment. The best-known is Finca Silletera El Rosario, run by members of the Londoño family, where a tour runs around COP 30,000 per person and includes a walk through their growing plots, a demonstration of silleta construction, and a mug of aguapanela that you'll need because it is cold up there. No heated tourist center. Just a farmhouse kitchen.

What struck me during my visit in July 2023 was how casually the youngest daughter, maybe twenty, corrected the narrative I'd absorbed from tourism brochures. "They always say the men carry the silletas," she said, tying hydrangea stems without looking down. "My grandmother carried hers. She just wasn't in the photos."

2. What the daughters are growing differently

The classic silleta features roses, cartuchos (calla lilies), agapanthus, sunflowers, and orchids — whatever blooms large and photographs well from a distance. The parade rewards size and symmetry. But several younger growers are pivoting their commercial operations toward crops that sell outside festival season: succulents, ornamental foliage, and native species like siete cueros and anturios that interior designers in El Poblado and Laureles actually want to buy on a Tuesday in March.

María Alejandra Atehortúa, who farms with her mother on a quarter-hectare plot along the road to Piedras Blancas, told me she sells more through Instagram than through the Plaza de Flores downtown. Her arrangements start at COP 45,000 and she delivers within Medellín proper. She's not abandoning the silleta tradition — she competed in 2022 and placed — but she's clear-eyed about the economics. "The parade gives us pride," she said. "Instagram gives us rent."

Skip the overpriced "flower farm experience" packages sold by some hostels in El Poblado. They charge COP 150,000 or more, bus you to a generic finca, and pad the afternoon with a salsa lesson that has nothing to do with flowers. You can arrange your own colectivo from the Terminal de Transportes del Norte to Santa Elena for about COP 5,000 each way.

3. The Plaza de Flores at 5 a.m.

Downstream from the farms, the commercial heart of Medellín's flower trade beats in the madrugada. The Plaza de Flores — officially the Plaza de Flórez, on Calle 55 between Carreras 52 and 53, near the old downtown — runs its wholesale market from around 4:30 a.m. By 7 a.m. the best stock is gone and you're left picking through stems that won't last two days.

I made the mistake of going at 10 a.m. on my first trip and thought the place was underwhelming. Wrong. At dawn, it's a working market: vendors shouting prices per dozen, buckets of astromelias going for COP 8,000, roses for COP 12,000 a bunch. Fluorescent light. Wet floor. Nobody is performing culture for you.

Some of the women selling here grew up in Santa Elena. A few still commute from the mountain.

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4. The parade itself — and why the consensus is wrong

Every travel guide tells you the Desfile de Silleteros is the highlight of the Feria de las Flores and that you should camp out early along the route for the best view. I disagree. The parade is long — four to five hours — and from street level, you mostly see the backs of other spectators' phones. The silletas pass quickly. The sound system drowns out everything.

The better experience is the pre-parade exhibition in Santa Elena itself, usually held the morning before. Silleteros lay their finished silletas out on the grass for judging, and you can walk among them, talk to the creators, and actually see the construction up close. The floral detail — a hummingbird rendered in dyed chrysanthemums, a political slogan spelled in carnations — is lost at parade distance.

Also worth knowing: the Feria runs for about ten days in late July and early August. The parade is one day. The other nine include concerts, horse parades (cabalgatas), and a classic car rally. The Orquideorama at the Jardín Botánico hosts flower exhibitions during the Feria that are genuinely good and far less chaotic than the parade route.

5. What stays after the petals drop

There's a small museo silletero in Santa Elena — more of a single room with photographs, old wooden frames, and handwritten histories — that almost nobody visits. It doesn't have regular hours. You ask around at the nearest tienda and someone calls someone. That informality is either frustrating or honest, depending on your disposition.

The photographs inside span decades. Black-and-white shots from the 1960s show men in ruanas hauling silletas that look heavier and rougher than today's ornate competition pieces. Somewhere around the 1980s, women start appearing. By the 2000s, teenagers.

The newest photo when I visited showed three sisters from Vereda Barro Blanco, all under thirty, holding a silleta shaped like the Colombian flag. They'd won a prize the previous August. Below the photo, someone had taped a handwritten note: "Tradición no es repetición. Es raíz." Tradition isn't repetition. It's root.

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