Students
Serranía de las Quinchas
With its unique location and largely unexplored forests, Serrania de las Quinchas is becoming increasingly recognised as a hotspot for scientists and students. Top botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK) together with Colombia’s Humboldt Institute have led several expeditions here in the forests around our communities, to collect seeds for storage and plant material for research.
With an area of 860 km2 of tropical rainforest and tropical high montane cloud forest with ranges in elevation from 200 m (600 ft) to 1,700 m (5,600 ft) Serrania de las Quinchas is the perfect place to study a range of forest ecosystems.
The area of Serrania de las Quinchas is also the subject of the BioResilience project, a collaborative study among the University of Exeter, University of Bristol, and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in the UK, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia UNAD de Colombia, and Instituto de Investigacion de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt (IAvH) in Colombia. The project integrates work across three components; palaeoecology, forest ecology and socio-environmental human geography and examines the long-term resilience of Colombian forest ecosystems to environment and climatic changes
We can offer student groups and researchers not only lodging, food and logistics, but our local community guides can help with guidance.
Accommodation
Food is prepared using fresh local ingredients many of which have been grown locally by us in our small holdings and allotments. If the group has special dietary requirements such as vegetarians, vegans, intolerance of allergies we need to have this information in advance to ensure we can accommodate their needs.
We invite you to stay as our guest in one of our family homes, living alongside us and sharing our daily life for a truly authentic experience. Although accommodation during your stay with us will be very simple, what we lack in comfort and luxury we more than make up for with the warmth of our family environments. Twelve families in the villages of Nazareth, Altazor, Quinchas, Pizarra, Betania, Camilo and Cocos are able to offer home stays for guests. Host families can accommodate between 4 and 15 guests depending on the family. Bathrooms are shared.