Alarcón Coronel Family of La Palestina, Cajamarca, Peru

In 1976, Don José Alarcón and Doña Zobeida Coronel packed up their four young children, left for the cloud-soaked hills of San José del Alto in the Jaén province of northern Peru, and bought a stretch of cattle pasture they reckoned could grow something better. They were right.

Nearly fifty years on, that pasture is Finca La Palestina: an 11-hectare patchwork of seven parcels, with three generations of Alarcón Coronels living in one sprawling compound.

A farm built one parcel at a time

Don José and Doña Zobeida planted the first trees, raised their kids on the farm, and bought up neighbouring land as the family grew, each new parcel destined to be passed on. By the early 1990s the next generation had the reins. Three of their sons, Juan, José and Anibal, took over and started reshaping things in earnest: upgrading the wet mill, standardising the processing, pushing on quality.

José and Anibal are the ones you'll most likely find at the centre of it now. José Praxedes oversees the farm, Anibal manages his own parcel and runs much of the post-harvest work, and the wider family turns out collectively at harvest. Different parcels, different specialisms, one wet mill, one name on the bag.

The land

The parcels run from 1,200 to 2,000 metres above sea level, averaging around 1,769. Roughly 90% of the land is hillside and the rest is forest. Two river basins, the Tabaconas and the Cochalán, set the climate. Temperatures hold between 18 and 24°C, and rain is close to constant.

The family will tell you, only half-jokingly, that anything they plant on this land grows with ease, and that observation has shaped how they work. Bananas, yucca and fruit trees grow alongside the coffee. Native shade trees have been steadily reintroduced. Over nearly fifty years, the original grassland has become something closer to a coffee forest.

Cup of Excellence

La Palestina made the top 20 of the Peruvian Cup of Excellence in 2019. A Gesha lot from the farm placed fourth in Cajamarca at the 2022 Cup of Excellence, scoring 90.15. The Alarcón Coronels are now a cornerstone of San José del Alto's specialty coffee community.

Origin Coffee Lab

Much of the recent step up has come through the family's relationship with Origin Coffee Lab, the Cajamarca-based exporter. OCL was established in 2017 by José "Pepe" Rivera, with his wife and business partner Mariagracia and co-founder Alex Julca. It started with four people. By 2023 it had 23 employees and worked with more than 360 partner producers.

Pepe is local. His grandparents grew coffee in San Ignacio, his father ran a coffee cooperative, and he spent his childhood between Peru, Switzerland and the Netherlands before training as a roaster and cupper and spending five years at Metric Coffee in Chicago. He came back to Peru to make sure smallholders in his home region could earn a proper living from quality coffee, and to put northern Peru on the specialty map.

OCL's approach is unusually farmer-first. They pay the full price upfront, start at 10% above local market rates and go up to 50% for micro-lots, and put the rest of their energy into education: agronomy workshops, business training, financing, quality control. The SCA gave Pepe its 2023 Sustainability Award in the individual category, shared that year with David Griswold of Sustainable Harvest.

For La Palestina, the partnership has meant phased renovation and replanting across the farm, the introduction of rarer varieties (Gesha, SL9, Bourbon Marshell) and early experiments with honey processing. Bourbon Marshell has a story of its own. It's named after the owner of the northern Peruvian farm where the unusual plants were first spotted, and the seed has since been multiplied and distributed to farms across the region, La Palestina among them.

Renovated trees at La Palestina have come into production considerably faster than the three years or more that coffee usually needs. Pepe and the OCL team describe the yields as "simply astounding".