Tour de Haciendas with Lunch, Cali

Overview

A private day trip to the historic haciendas of the Cauca Valley, including Hacienda Pie de Chinche and its sugar cane museum, and Hacienda La María 'El Paraíso,' which inspired the classic Colombian novel María by Jorge Isaacs, with a traditional lunch in Ginebra, Valle.

This is a private day trip for your group only, with medical assistance coverage and a guide throughout. You'll see two genuinely historic haciendas and finish with a traditional lunch at a local restaurant in Ginebra, Valle.

Highlights

• Hacienda Pie de Chinche Visit this historic hacienda and its sugar cane museum.
• Hacienda El Paraíso See the hacienda that inspired Jorge Isaacs' classic Colombian novel María.
• Traditional lunch in Ginebra Enjoy a typical regional lunch at a local restaurant.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

A private day trip to the historic haciendas of the Cauca Valley, including Hacienda Pie de Chinche and its sugar cane museum, and Hacienda La María 'El Paraíso,' which inspired the classic Colombian novel María by Jorge Isaacs, with a traditional lunch in Ginebra, Valle. This is a private day trip for your group only, with medical assistance coverage and a guide throughout. You'll see two genuinely historic haciendas and finish with a traditional lunch at a local restaurant in Ginebra, Valle.

Hacienda Piedechinche is the older of the two estates on this route by nearly a century. Its colonial plantation house was built around 1715 by José Sebastián Borrero and Josefa Costa, using adobe mixed with cow's blood as a traditional binder, and its floor plan was laid out in the shape of a cross as a tribute to the family's Catholic faith. Four generations of the Borrero family lived there until 1886, when the González family bought the property; the Ingenio Providencia sugar company acquired it in 1942, and it was finally converted into the Museo de la Caña de Azúcar — the Sugar Cane Museum — which opened to the public in 1981. The grounds still hold authentic machinery spanning the full history of sugar processing in the valley, alongside roughly 30 colonial-era paintings and religious artifacts inside the house itself.

Hacienda El Paraíso has a different, more literary claim to fame. The house was built between 1816 and 1828 by Víctor Cabal, a cattleman and former mayor of Cali, and was bought by the father of writer Jorge Isaacs in 1828. It's here that Isaacs set most of his 1867 novel María — widely regarded as one of the foundational works of Latin American Romanticism — telling the story of the doomed romance between Efraín and his cousin María, who dies shortly before he can return from Europe to see her. The Valle del Cauca government purchased the estate in 1953 and formally declared it a National Monument on December 30, 1959; it's now preserved as a museum centered on both the hacienda's own history and the novel it inspired.

Both estates sit in the Cauca Valley's sugar-growing belt around Ginebra and El Cerrito — flat, fertile farmland that has supported large-scale sugar cane cultivation since the colonial period and still does today, which is part of why the valley developed such a concentration of grand rural estates in the first place. Rounding out the day with a traditional lunch in Ginebra itself keeps the visit grounded in the region's actual working agricultural landscape, rather than treating the haciendas as isolated museum pieces.