COLOMBIAN COFFEE BEANS EL SANTUARIO ESTATE TIPICA
Special Coffee Beans from “SANTUARIO ESTATE”, Colombia
The Department of Cauca in Colombia is a world-renowned region of the highest quality coffee productions, and the coffee has strong and perfect body with rich exotic aroma and clear and balanced acidity.
In the mountains of central Colombia, Ecotopia 218-A (Popayan, El Tambo, Cajibío, Piendamó) is a specialty area matched for coffee productions because of the conditions of sunlight, the amount of rainfall, altitude, soils, etc.
This region, located in the heart of Cauca department, is called the Popayan highlands that has large temperature differences between day and night. The highlands is blessed with abundant rainfall; therefore, it's suitable for high quality coffee productions.
Santuario Estate (Santuario Coffee Farm) is located in Cajibio, where is 96 km south of Cali, the second largest city in Colombia, and 24 km north of Popayan, a city continued from the colonial period. You can see the Puracé Volcano (4,646 m above the sea) on the southeast direction from this farm.
The owner of Santuario Estate Mr. Camilo Merizalde designed the farm from a scratch, and in 1999, he started the project of resurrecting good old Colombian Mild coffee over 30 years ago under completely sustainable conditions (soil conservation, community involvement and biodiversity protection) in a pasture before.
For making "supreme estate coffee" in the world of specialty coffee, Santuario Estate has developed a very high quality working manual that regulates the processes of young trees' planting, crops and careful selections. The farm is in the hills as 1850 - 2100 m above the sea and covers approximately 260ha, including 188ha for cultivating coffee trees.
There are rich forests with huge trees, creating a canopy, spread inside and outside of the farm, and the forests become important dwellings for birds and other wildlife.
They've chosen only good nursery trees of native coffee species and planted small quantities of Tipica (85%), Bourbon (10%), Maragogype and Mocha. The farm is separated to 0.25ha per unit (block) which has been developed and the operations of shading, fertilizing, weeding-out and harvesting are strictly controlled for each.
The legume Tephrosia is mainly planted for shading coffee trees, improving soils through nitrogen fixation and managing the maintenance of inorganic soils necessary for leaves' expansion and cherries’ growth. The farm administers organic fertilizers to the soils along their fertilizer management and doesn't spray pesticides because the elevation is high and pest problems occurred rarely.
In May 2005, Santuario Estate was able to celebrate their first fledged commercial harvest after their project started in 1999. The one cropped in the first year is great coffee of 100% Tipica. It has a body and characters: "dry but sweet" that Tipica coffee grown at high altitude has and "fruitiness" like wine.
Santuario Community Project (Community Involvement)
In Colombia, there are rarely positive contributions to the local community even medium and large sized coffee farms. Since 1999, Santuario Estate has planted not only specialty coffee but herbs and fruit trees and been working to make sustainable farm that is environmentally friendly through preserving the environment, beekeeping and ecotourism. Their efforts for environmental preservation are not immediately connected to the quality of coffee; however, the coffee cherries grown in harmony with nature will ripen slowly and bring the highest quality one. On their community project, Santuario Estate provided their successful technology, knowledge and experience to people in Paezu village nearby the farm and started to develop a project model. The farm will have continued making efforts for people in the village to spend their stable and balanced life in the future.
----- Information -----
1.Santuario Estate
2.Owner of the Farm: Mr. Camilo Merizalde
3.Altitude: 1850 〜 2100m
4.Variety of Coffee: Tipica, etc.
