Gregorio Palli Mamani grows coffee on a hillside that was once rumoured to be sitting on gold. It isn't, as far as anyone can tell. But close to four decades in, the land has turned out to be worth rather a lot anyway.
His farm, Volcán del Tigre, sits in Copacabana – a colonia, or small agricultural village, tucked into the hills of Bolivia's Caranavi province. Caranavi means "high place" in Aymara, and it's earned a second name since: the Coffee Capital of Bolivia. The town itself sits too low to grow anything worth roasting, so the farms are scattered across the surrounding slopes, in a transitional strip of country where the eastern Andes tip down towards the Amazon basin. Lush, steep, and very good at making coffee.
The Road to Caranavi
Gregorio's family didn't start here. He was born in Muñecas, a remote province just north of Lake Titicaca, in a town with no school. So his parents packed up and moved roughly 100km to Caranavi, purely so their son could get an education.
It's a decision that keeps paying off. Gregorio is a full-time coffee producer now, living on the farm with his wife Daisy and their two youngest children, who help out when they can. His brother Julio runs a nearby farm called San Bartolomé. And his daughter Nancy, one of two grown-up children from his first marriage, has graduated from playing on her dad's farm to running her own.
Smoke, Gold and a Tiger's Path
Before it was a well-tended specialty farm, this land was wild. Locals swore they could see smoke drifting up from one of the jungle hills and decided it must be a volcano. Local legend has it that where smoke rises from the hills, there's gold to be found underneath.
Around the same time, people noticed a footpath worn through the undergrowth. Not a human one. It was a trail made by a jaguar, known locally as a tigre, doing its rounds.
Put the two together and you get Volcán del Tigre. Tiger's Volcano. No gold has surfaced, and nobody's seen the jaguar in years, but Gregorio still won't keep livestock on the farm. No sense tempting fate.
Two Farms, Facing Each Other
Volcán del Tigre runs to 12 hectares, though only two are currently planted with coffee. The other ten are the plan. Gregorio has been steadily expanding his growing area and is genuinely excited about what the farm looks like in another ten years.
Nancy's farm sits just across the valley, on the opposite hillside, close enough that father and daughter can look across at each other's trees. Hers is smaller, and it doesn't have a name yet. In Bolivia that's normal for newer farms – naming tends to come with size and time, and Nancy hasn't been at this as long as her dad. Roland, our Green Buyer, met the whole family there on his 2025 trip. On the strength of what's in the cup, we'd say a name is coming.
What Sol de la Mañana Changed
Both farms are part of Sol de la Mañana, or "morning sun" – Bolivia's first producer mentoring programme, set up by the Rodríguez family of Agricafe in 2014 after a group of local farmers approached them for help.
It runs like a school. Seven years, start to finish, covering nursery management, planting, soil, pruning, selective harvesting, pest control and financial planning. Before the programme, most farms in the region were what the family politely call "wild" – visited at harvest, largely ignored the rest of the year, yielding two to four bags per hectare. Many participating farms now manage 20 to 30. Producers also receive 70% of the price their coffee sells for, so the improvements land where they should. The programme won the SCA's Sustainable Business Model award in 2019 and now supports more than 100 farms across the region.
For Gregorio, the practical wins have been about defending what he's got. He's had trouble with leaf rust, coffee borer beetle and ojo de gallo (American leaf spot, a fungus that thrives in exactly the cool, humid, high-altitude conditions that make Caranavi coffee taste so good, and strips the trees of their leaves). The programme taught him how to get all three under control. On two hectares, losing even a slice of the harvest to pests is the difference between a decent year and a difficult one. Nancy, newer to all this, is getting the same grounding from the start.
In the Cup
Cherry from both farms goes down to Agricafe's Buena Vista mill in the evening, where it's weighed, sampled and logged before processing. Traditionally that's meant a straight washed process. More recently it's been Mosto Fermented Washed, where the fermentation liquid from an earlier batch is used to kick-start the next one. Think of a sourdough starter, but for coffee.
The results are worth the effort. Bright lime and blackcurrant up front, with deep cocoa underneath holding it all together. Earlier lots have leaned more towards milk chocolate and orange.
In his free time, Gregorio walks around town with his kids, swims in the river and plays football. Which, after four decades of hillside farming, seems more than fair.
Details
- Country: Bolivia
- Department: La Paz
- Province: Caranavi
- Colonia: Copacabana
- Farm: Volcán del Tigre
- Farm size: 12 hectares, 2 planted with coffee
- Elevation: 1,504 m.a.s.l.
- Varietals grown: Caturra & Catuai
- Processing: Washed and Mosto Fermented Washed
- Programme: Sol de la Mañana
Gregorio and Nancy's neighbours in Copacabana include a few other Ozone favourites, Vincent Palli and Martin Chirino among them. Have a look at the rest of our Bolivian coffees if you'd like to explore the region further.
