The Tea and Coffee Country of Tamil Nadu: A Plantation Guide

Tamil Nadu grows two of the drinks that define the Indian morning, and it grows them on different mountains. Tea belongs to the high, cool ridgelines of the Nilgiris in the far north-west of the state; coffee belongs to the slightly lower, shadier slopes of the Shevaroys, the Palanis, the Anamalais and the Kolli hills. In a handful of places — Valparai above all — the two crops share the same estates. This guide maps out where each is grown, what makes it distinctive, how the plantations came to be, and how a traveller can actually visit a working factory or stay on an estate.

The Nilgiris: high-grown tea

The Nilgiris — the “Blue Mountains” — are the heart of South Indian tea. Their estates lie between roughly 1,000 and 2,500 metres, which places them in the “high-grown” class prized for a brisk, fragrant liquor; because there is no true dormant winter, the bushes are plucked the year round. Nilgiri tea carries a Geographical Indication tag, granted in 2008, which by widely repeated accounts made it the 100th product in India to be so protected — meaning only tea grown and processed within the district may be sold under the name. The tea country clusters around Ooty (Udhagamandalam), Coonoor and Wellington, and it is easy to see the process for yourself. The tea museum and factory near Ooty walks visitors through withering, rolling and drying, while the Highfield Tea Estate and factory at Wellington, near Coonoor, runs a long-established estate tour that ends, inevitably, at a tasting counter.

The Anamalais and Valparai

South of the Nilgiris, the Anamalai hills rise steeply above the Coimbatore plains, and their tea capital is Valparai. Reached by a famously winding ghat road of some forty hairpin bends up from Pollachi, Valparai sits above roughly 1,000 metres and is ringed by dozens of tea and coffee estates — local counts put the figure at around fifty-odd — many still worked by long-established plantation companies. The plateau grows tea on its open slopes and shade-grown coffee, cardamom and pepper in its pockets of forest, so a single drive can take you past both crops. The estates also share the hills with wildlife: the same tea gardens are grazed by gaur and skirted by lion-tailed macaques on the forest edge. Worthwhile stops on the way up and around include the Aliyar Dam and reservoir at the foot of the ghat and the Nallamudi Poonjolai viewpoint, which looks out over a rolling sea of tea and cloud.

Coffee in the Palanis and Shevaroys

Coffee, not tea, is the signature crop of Tamil Nadu’s other hill ranges, and it is grown in the classic South Indian way — under shade, beneath taller trees, rather than in open monoculture. The Shevaroy Hills around Yercaud, in Salem district, are the best-known coffee country: estates here sit at roughly 1,000 to 1,500 metres and grow mostly Arabica, with robusta on the lower, warmer margins, and Yercaud keeps a notable cluster of heritage estates with long ownership records. Between the coffee rows you will often find pepper vines and silver-oak shade trees; Yercaud’s other draws, such as the silk farm and rose garden, sit among the plantations. Coffee is also grown, on a smaller scale, in the Kolli Hills of Namakkal and across the Palani hills. It is worth being honest about the Palanis, though: Kodaikanal and its lake are far better known as a hill station than as plantation country, and the Palani slopes are associated as much with coffee smallholdings and temperate fruit orchards — pears, plums and oranges — as with large estates.

A short history of the estates

Both crops arrived with the nineteenth century. Coffee generally came first: in the Shevaroys it is usually credited to the 1820s, when M. D. Cockburn, an East India Company collector at Salem, is said to have established coffee and fruit on his estates. Tea in the Nilgiris began as an experiment — seeds were tried near Kotagiri and Coonoor in the 1830s, in the circle around John Sullivan, the district’s founding British administrator — but it did not become a serious commercial crop until the 1850s, when the first estates were laid out around Coonoor. Plucking, road-building and factory work drew large numbers of labourers, many of them Tamil families whose descendants still live in the plantation lines today. Over the following century the hills filled with company-run estates, and although ownership has changed many times since, the basic geography the planters created — tea up high, coffee in the shade below — is still the one you travel through.

Visiting: factories and estate stays

Visiting the plantations is refreshingly easy. Around Coonoor and Ooty, several estates and the tea museum run short factory tours that trace the leaf’s journey from wither to cup and sell fresh single-estate tea at the gate; go in the morning, when the machinery is usually running. Many of the old planters’ bungalows on both the tea and coffee estates now take guests, and an estate stay — waking to mist over the bushes, walking the rows with a manager, watching the day’s plucking come in — is the most rewarding way to understand this landscape. A few practical notes: factories may close on Mondays or during heavy monsoon, working estates are private property so ask before wandering in, and the ghat roads up to Valparai and the Nilgiris are slow and winding, so plan short driving days. For more on the hill towns themselves, see our guides at /india/tamil-nadu/guides/tamil-nadu-hill-stations and /india/tamil-nadu/guides/coimbatore-and-valparai-in-3-days.