Emmanuel Enciso - El Vergel, Colombia

Emmanuel Enciso and the Black Condor Project: Gaitania, Tolima

To understand what Emmanuel Enciso has built in Gaitania, you first need to understand what this part of Colombia has been through. Gaitania is a small village in the municipality of Planadas, in the far south of Tolima – a region often cited as the birthplace of Colombian coffee, but one that spent decades locked out of the markets that celebrate it. For much of the late 20th century, the FARC operated through these mountains. International buyers didn't come. Infrastructure didn't come. The specialty coffee world, which was discovering Huila and Nariño and sending buyers to origin, largely passed this place by.

What makes Gaitania's story unusual is that even during the conflict, this community negotiated its own way through it. In 1996, the indigenous Nasa Wes'x people of Gaitania signed a peace agreement directly with the FARC – the only community in Colombia to hold any such agreement with the armed forces before the national peace accord of 2016. Thousands of lives were saved. The landscape was, to a remarkable degree, preserved. And the coffee kept growing.

After the 2016 national peace accord, the region opened up. Coffee growers who had been displaced or cut off from global markets began returning, and the revival of coffee farming in former conflict zones offered the potential to boost Colombia's coffee output significantly. In Gaitania, Emmanuel Enciso was already positioned to make something of that moment.

Emmanuel and His Family

Emmanuel grew up in a coffee family – his parents were producers, and they taught him the crop from the ground up. In 2006, he had the chance to go deeper, learning about processing, quality, and varietals in a more structured way. He came back to Gaitania with a clearer sense of what was possible: he focused his own farm and encouraged neighbouring producers to aim for specialty quality rather than the commodity market that had always dictated their prices. The potential was obviously there. The problem was scale – and infrastructure.

No single smallholder in this area had the processing capacity to produce the volumes that specialty buyers need. Without a central facility, the coffees would stay blended, anonymous, and underpaid. So in 2016, Emmanuel and his family built one.

The Black Condor Project

The processing centre at Emmanuel's farm – Finca La Roma – became a hub for more than 15 villages across Gaitania. Then in 2019, importer Forest Coffee came in as a partner, and the project got its name: the Black Condor. Together, they built proper washing stations and drying infrastructure, and established a direct trade relationship that pays producers 30% above the market rate for top-quality lots. Regular workshops run throughout the year, covering fermentation, drying technique, cupping, and quality assessment – giving producers not just a market, but the knowledge to keep improving their position in it. The programme now works with over 100 coffee growers from across the community.

The name Black Condor is fitting. The Andean condor is Colombia's national bird – a symbol of freedom, sovereignty, and power, featured on the national coat of arms since 1834. It soars over the Andes, including the mountains of Tolima, and for indigenous Andean communities it has long been understood as a symbol of the upper world, of renewal and perspective. For a project built in a post-conflict community, trying to lift smallholders into a market that had ignored them for decades, the name carries real weight.

The Coffee

Processing at Finca La Roma is handled by Emmanuel and his sister Valentina. After harvest, cherry undergoes a short washed fermentation of around 24 hours in mucilage, followed by a thorough washing. The coffee then dries on patios in the sun, before a stabilisation period of 20 to 25 days ahead of dry milling. It's a careful, consistent approach – exactly what's needed when you're building a reputation from scratch in a market that values traceability and reliability above all.

The farms in the Black Condor project sit between 1,650 and 1,950 metres above sea level, producing primarily Caturra and Colombia varietals on terrain that – thanks in part to the long isolation of the conflict years – retains much of its organic character. Altiplano soils, temperate climate, significant rainfall. The conditions are excellent. Emmanuel's project is what turns those conditions into coffee that can be told apart from anywhere else in Colombia.