Some farms have a single origin story. Las Moritas has dozens. Don Higinio and Doña Aura bought their first small plot of land in 1988 with seeds passed down from his father and less than a hectare to their name. The land had grown tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and corn before coffee ever took root here. Those first trees were bourbon varietals, planted small and tended carefully, and every year the couple added more land to what they had started together.
That first plot, San José Las Moritas, became the foundation for something much larger. Today, Las Moritas stretches across 70 hectares in Guatemala, with 56 of those devoted entirely to coffee. It is not one farm so much as a living collection of places, each with its own name, personality, and history. Cerro de Oro, El Potrero, La Camioneta, La Posa, Real Café Los Planes, Moritas Vista Real. Every parcel carries a different story in its soil, shaped by whatever grew there before the coffee arrived.
Spanning 1,700 to 1,800 meters in altitude, the land moves through planes, hills, mountains, and cliffs that somehow still get harvested every season. The terrain shifts from lot to lot, and so does the soil, the climate, and the character of what grows there. That diversity is exactly what makes Las Moritas so interesting in the cup.
The coffee itself reflects decades of thoughtful accumulation rather than a single master plan. You will find red and yellow bourbon, pache, pacamara, castillo, typica, catuaí, caturra, and a dozen rarer varietals growing across these parcels. Some sections have the organized look of newly planted rows. Others are beautifully chaotic, older varieties growing in the kind of loose, layered arrangement that only time can create. Plants of every age share the land. Shade comes from ingas, pine, avocado, and natural forest growing overhead.
Because the climate runs dry, Don Higinio built an irrigation system using reservoirs and gravity-fed tubes that carry water between the lots. No pumps, no electricity. Just water finding its own way downhill to the plants that need it.
Harvest begins each November in the lowest elevations and works its way upward through April, when the highest parts of Las Moritas finally finish. Las Moritas also continues to grow corn, beans, tomatoes, and peaches for local markets, much the way the land was used long before the first coffee seed was ever planted here.
What Don Higinio and Doña Aura built from a single small plot and a handful of seeds from his father is now one of the most layered, storied coffee farms we work with. Every bag from Las Moritas carries a little bit of all of it.
