Guatemala's Culture & Regions

Located in the heart of the Americas, most of Guatemala's 42,000 square miles are mountain, forest or jungle. Guatemala has eleven million inhabitants. Three million live in, or near, the modern and growing capital of Guatemala City. Most of the rest live in small cities and towns along the paved roads, or off the beaten track in the thousands of villages and hamlets that blankets the country. Most of the Guatemalans who cultivate coffee are individuals who plant on small family plots and process their harvest in cooperative mills or by hand. And their numbers are growing. What is it that makes the coffee cultivated by Guatemalans so special? Many microclimates, ideal rainfall patterns, high mountain ranges, and a variety of rich soils that combine to produce seven genuine regional coffees for the specialty market. The coffee cultivated in Guatemala forms part of the largest artificial forest in Central America. This forest, made up of coffee and shade trees, covers 650,000 acres and produces between four and five million tons of oxygen per day. The same amount is generated by a rainforest half its size.

Guatemala's culture and history is as rich, complex and varied as our coffee ... and as stepped in tradition!

Coffee's by-products are placed back into the earth cycle: pulp and mucilage are used as fertilizer, and husk as fuel for the dryers.

Grown on the contour, coffee helps prevent erosion and protect the watershed.

Coffee is reducing pressure on Guatemala's great forests, which include the largest rainforest in Central America. Shade trees, as they are pruned, provide 16% of the firewood consumed in Guatemala, where most households traditionally cook with wood.

We have given each region a nametag reflecting one of its most distinguishing characteristics to help you discover Guatemala and your own perfect cup.

	Antigua Coffee Antigua's coffee is "Classic" because it comes from Guatemala's oldest and best-known coffee-growing region.
	Traditional Atitlan Eighty percent of Traditional Atitlan is grown by small producers, mostly ethnic Maya. "Traditional" reflects they way many process their harvest: by hand.
	Fraijanes Plateau This region is so high, extensive and rugged, that most people never realize they're standing on a plateau, much less one that defines the geographic heart of the country and rivals Antigua as the oldest coffee growing region in the country.
	Highland Huehue Although all of Guatemala's specialty grade coffee is grown high in the mountains, we saved the "Highland" distinction for Huehuetenango. The region's magnificent Cuchumatanes mountain range has the highest non-volcanic peaks in all of Central America.
	New Oriente It's "Oriente" because it's Guatemala's eastern most specialty coffee region. It's "New" because it's the new kid on the block and bursting with energy.
	Volcanic San Marcos San Marcos gets the coveted "volcanic" nametag because it has more volcanoes then any other coffee-growing regions, including the highest in Central America: the spectacular Tajumulco and Tacana.
	Rainforest Coban "Coban" comes from the Maya Keckchi word "cob" (the place of clouds). Rainforests are characteristic of the region as is the moisture that nourishes them.

The overwhelming majority of coffee growers in Guatemala are individuals who work their farms as a family: over 59,000 of small coffee growers throughout the country. Most of them belong to to one of the twenty ethnic groups of Mayan descent.

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