Several years ago, a coffee shop by my office had seasonal Nicaraguan coffee beans for sale. Coffee bags with big letters NICARAGUA had an image of a man in a blue shirt holding a basket of ripe coffee cherries. The name of the coffee was “Don Zeledon”, and the coffee shop’s Facebook page stated that it was from the northern departments of the country and was named in honor of Benjamin Zeledon, a National Hero of Nicaragua. At the time, I did not think much of it. But as I started to prepare for our recent trip to Nicaragua, including reading more about the history of the country and the U.S.-Nicaraguan relationships, I recalled the Don Zeledon coffee and the “National Hero” part.
As it turned out, Benjamin Zeledon was a Nicaraguan lawyer, politician, and soldier, who commanded the rebel forces fighting the U.S. at the outset of the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua. In the fall of 1912, Mr. Zeledon was killed at the Battle of Coyotepe Hill while attacking U.S. Marines. Mr. Zeledon’s martyr death earned him the posthumous title of “National Hero” and had a profound impact on another Nicaraguan - Augusto Cesar Sandino. Young Sandino witnessed how the lifeless body of Mr. Zeledon was carried through his town in an oxcart by U.S. servicemen and then went on to dedicate his life to guerilla warfare against the U.S. until the Marines finally departed from Nicaragua in 1933.
And this presents an interesting question: how does a U.S. coffee shop sell to U.S. consumers coffee beans named after someone who was waging a war against their home country (however justified the fight of Mr. Zeledon against the U.S. was, whom he unquestionably considered invaders)? Maybe no one at the coffee shop checked what exactly Mr. Zeledon did to become the National Hero of Nicaragua. Or maybe this was a conscious decision on the coffee shop’s part to respect their Nicaraguan partners’ naming decision. Who knows? But this only further fueled our interest to visit Nicaragua and especially its north – the coffee region.
We spent three days in the Jinotega/Matagalpa area, a premier coffee-growing region of Nicaragua. To date, this was the most comprehensive coffee tour of our travels through various coffee-growing destinations. Our visit was not just a pop by a coffee farm or a guided tour through coffee fields. For three days, we were in the heart of the coffee-producing region, doing coffee-related activities and learning about the history of coffee in Nicaragua and its business side.
Our journey into the coffee country began when we left Somoto Canyon and headed to our Airbnb outside Matagalpa. As our car started to descend towards Jinotega, coffee trees started to appear on both sides of the road. This reminded us of our travels through El Salvador three years prior when driving on Ruta de Las Flores, we were passing through coffee fields and stopping to enjoy views and chew on sweet ripe coffee cherries that tasted like candies. The drive through Nicaragua was just as scenic.
The first stop was in San Rafael del Norte. The major attraction here is a cathedral unmistakenly depicting Daniel Ortega as a demon in one of the provocative wall murals. Like any other town in Nicaragua, San Rafael also has a cute, leafy central park. But for us, the main draw was a coffee shop called Coffee Lovers Café right by the central park. It turned out to be one of the best coffee shops we visited in the entire country. The café was spacious with an outside patio overlooking sublime green hills. Sipping an aromatic cup of joe on the patio, we were leafing through a guidebook reading up more about the coffee region and Nicaraguan coffee. On the way out, we also purchased our first bag of coffee to take home (the total count of coffee bags we bought in Nicaragua was a staggering 9 bags), and as we later found out, the most delicious beans were from this coffee shop in the little town hidden in the Nicaraguan highlands.
Because we completely underestimated the beauty of the region, we moved towards our Airbnb at a very slow pace. The stunning landscape pressed us to make frequent stops to admire the views, and soon, we realized that we were running late. We decided to skip Jinotega, simply passing through this dusty and hectic town. Jinotega was also the only place in Nicaragua where we got stuck in traffic. But even standing in traffic we could observe the daily goings of the Nicaraguan coffee industry. Right by the main road, people were drying coffee beans by turning them with a special wooden rake on a black tarp under the blazing sun. The process looked very familiar to what we saw in Cambodia, where farmers dried rice by the side of the road in a very similar fashion. Pressed for time, we also skipped Selva Negra, one of the best places to learn about the history of Nicaraguan coffee and for hiking, choosing to come back the following day to spend the entire day there.
We finally got to our Airbnb at Finca El Socorro in the late afternoon. Julia already wrote about the arduous final leg of the trip to get to the finca, and about the delight of witnessing a calf being born upon arrival. Despite the bumpy road, we loved our stay at this working coffee farm nestled at the foot of a mountain. Every morning, we woke up in this beautiful corner of Nicaragua surrounded by coffee trees and sipped delicious fresh French-press coffee made by our hosts for breakfast from the beans harvested nearby. But even more amazingly, the finca owners were one of the friendliest people we’ve ever met in our travels, and they were eager to tell us everything about Nicaragua, their farm life, and the coffee-growing business.
Next week read about the coffee farm’s owner spilling the beans on the secrets of Nicaraguan coffee.
