San José del Palmar is a municipality and town in the Chocó Department, Colombia in the central part of the country, 240 km west of the capital Bogotá.

The highest point nearby is 1,737 meters above sea level, 1.0 km southeast of San José del Palmar.

The general characteristics of the climate approximately coincide with the middle position of intertropical convergence (equator climate 5°N), a situation which results in a few climatological characteristics: high humidity, abundant rains because of the effect of dynamic thermic convection from air masses, annual distribution of precipitation (bimodal regime) as a function of CIT displacement and thermal variations throughout the year (at the level of average monthly temperatures) almost always lower than 2 °C or 3.6 °F.

The distribution of precipitation throughout the year are characterized by a bimodal regime, typical of an equatorial climate, defined by the succession of four rain-periods as follows: two rainy periods and two of less rain.

The population was founded by Esther Espinosa, Luis Angel Colorado, Paulino Villegas, Norberto Uribe, Eliseo Flores, Marco Salazar, and Pedro Monsalve en 1938 on the borders of the departments of Risaralda and Valle del Cauca.

San José del Palmar is a mountainous territory, marked by a succession of elevations belonging to the Western Range that forms a large number of canyons and a few wide and deep valleys.

The principal heights of the municipality are: to the north, the Tamana hills, with 4,200 m of elevation, and the Tatama, with 3,950 m, and near the southwest of the Torra, with 3,670 m, which are part of the Paraguas range.

The expansion of agricultural exploitation and logging into designated forest zones contribute significantly to the acceleration of erosion processes, generating grave problems with mudslides that put inhabitants at risk.

This situation is made worse by the lack of vegetal cover that typically cushions the high rainfall and loss of soil, which causes mass rockfalls.

In the municipality of San Jose of Palmar, the population is mixed: the first inhabitants were indigenous people from the Chamies group; before the colonization process that gave rise to its foundation, there were already people at the banks of the Ingara fiver, in the region of Valencia, Black populations in the San Juan river basin, and after that the colonizers who settled in the territory from other parts of the country, principally from the departments of Antioquia, Valle del Cauca, old Caldas, and Tolia.