Set within the traditional, colourful and friendly town of Jericó, Las Cometas Hostel is a home away from home for budget travellers, off the beaten path explorers, peaceful nature lovers and adrenaline, adventure junkies.
Our community-based hostel is perfect to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life in Medellin offering a range of tours and social activities; the freshest food and coffee in our ethical café and a relaxing hammock area in our exotic garden. Our informative, multi-lingual staff and volunteers will serve you and go beyond to make you feel at home.
With some of Colombia's finest hiking, paragliding, horse-riding through lush coffee farms, Jericó is a haven for those with a sense of adventure and taste of the outdoors. As soon as you step out of the hostel, the town is engulfed with enriched local and artistic culture with carriel workshops, seven interesting museums and the sounds of clip-clopping horses and the ding-donging church bells, where you will the authentic Colombia experience.
At Las Cometas Hostel in Jericó, we want to contribute and enrich the local community, as well as the surrounding areas. We wanted to go beyond just being a hostel that serves guests, hence have started several projects since opening the hostel, aiming to help the people Jericó in many unique ways. Currently, we have four main projects – teaching English to the local people, a coffee brand with the aim of developing fair wages to the farmers, cultivating a local chocolatier business, and working alongside other local businesses. These projects have grown immensely with the help from our volunteers.
Café Jericó
Café Jericó is a coffee brand that we have started and developed at the hostel, a project realised after visiting a local coffee farm on the outskirts of Jericó. Amazed by the beautiful surrounding landscape, Arcoiris waterfall, and the entire coffee process, we immediately felt connected with the farm. The farm was started by Ariel, and his father Diego, 30 years ago, and as we got to know them, we learned about the hard work behind growing and processing coffee – the amount of commitment, dedication and patience required in the hot weather to process even just one coffee seed to the pergamino coffee bean. We realised we wanted to share the beauty of this farm, so we discussed with Ariel and Diego about doing a tour of the farm through the hostel, where they would benefit by receiving an entrance fee. We have been running the tours for a year now, and our guests are able to get an immersive, full day experience.
We also came to learn that they sell their coffee in bulk to the coffee cooperative, but are not getting paid much for it, so we decided to buy Ariel and Diego’s coffee at a fair price, and serve all our guests a fresh delicious cup of their coffee every morning. This way, we could help the farmers, and make our guests even happier. Our guests have loved the coffee, and wanted to take some back home to their countries, making us realise the potential to develop a coffee brand. With the help from the farmers, and travellers, we have developed Café Jericó, our own coffee brand. Our volunteers have designed the creative logo and packaging for the brand, and every bag has a personalised touch of colour, making each one unique. Our dream is to sell Café Jericó in shops and cafes all around the world, so the farmers in the South-West mountains of Antioquia, near Jericó, can work with more dignity and pride in their work.
Teaching English in Jericó
We understand the importance of learning English in this day and age, especially for the tourism industry. As international tourism in Jericó increases, we realise that local hoteliers, restaurant owners, and other businesses will have issues communicating with travellers, and to address this concern, we want to be able to help them learn English. By inviting adults from the local community to learn English at the hostel, we have been able to help several groups improve their English abilities. Many individuals lack the knowledge of basic words and phrases in English, such as numbers, and question words; hence, by attending classes, we have observed a huge improvement in their language abilities.
We would like to thank all our volunteers who have taught English to the locals here in Jericó, their efforts and dedication have a very real impact in the community.
Recently we have started teaching some of the local children English in a community centre in the town. There are currently two groups who attend the class. We found that the children learn basic English at school, but don´t get to practice speaking or get taught the incorrect pronunciation. The aim of these classes are for the kids to have fun whilst learning English and be able to communicate in another language.
Working alongside local businesses
As the hostel has grown and more travellers want to discover and explore Jericó, we started to link up with local businesses to let our guests have more options but also to give business to others in the town. We now offer different tours such as horse riding, paragliding at Ecoland, Coffee tours with La Nohelia, Spa day at Vista Hermosa and a chocolate workshop at Dulcearte. We receive many guests and volunteers who want to either learn or develop their spanish skills, therefore developed a relationship with Angelo at the local Spanish School. Also, in the hostel and on our website, we have information about different restaurants, cafés and museums to raise awareness of all the different businesses in town.
Environment
At Las Cometas, we being environmentally conscious is our priority. We care deeply about recycling – our hostel has elements of recycled wood utilised in its construction, from its structure to furniture. We also use recycling bins to separate our waste. All food waste is put to compost, which we then use in our garden. Being conscious about our water usage, we have installed a water tank to curb our usage of water.
