In 1976, Don José Alarcón and Doña Zobeida Coronel made a decision that would shape the next half-century of their family's life. They 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 hunch has become Finca La Palestina: an 11-hectare patchwork of seven parcels, three generations of Alarcón Coronels living in one sprawling compound, and one of the more quietly impressive coffee farms in the Cajamarca region.
The story of La Palestina is really the story of a family figuring it out together. Don José and Doña Zobeida planted the first trees, raised their kids on the farm, and slowly bought up neighbouring land as the family grew, with 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) inherited the responsibility and started reshaping things in earnest, upgrading the wet mill, standardising the processing, leaning hard into quality. Today, José and Anibal are the ones you'll most likely find at the centre of it all. José Praxedes oversees the farm, Anibal manages his own parcel and runs much of the post-harvest work, and the wider family pitches in collectively at harvest time. Different parcels, different specialisms, one wet mill, one name on the bag.
It's a farm that runs on relationships. The family will tell you, only half-jokingly, that anything they plant on this land seems to grow with ease, and that observation has shaped how they work. They don't farm coffee in isolation. Bananas, yucca and fruit trees grow alongside the coffee, native shade trees have been steadily reintroduced, and the original grassland has gradually become something closer to a coffee forest. Over more than seven decades, the family have rebuilt the ecosystem rather than stripped it back. It's a slow, considered way of farming, and you can taste it in the cup.
That patient approach has earned them a real reputation. They cracked the top 20 of the Peruvian Cup of Excellence in 2019. A Gesha lot from the farm went on to take fourth place in Cajamarca at the 2022 Cup of Excellence with a 90.15 SCA score. Quietly, methodically, the Alarcón Coronels have become a cornerstone of San José del Alto's specialty coffee community.
A lot of their recent leap forward has come through their relationship with Origin Coffee Lab, the Cajamarca-based exporter who, alongside the family, are central to the La Palestina story today. OCL was founded in 2017 by José "Pepe" Rivera, with his wife and business partner Mariagracia, and co-founder Alex Julca. 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, working for five years at Metric Coffee in Chicago. He came back to Peru with a clear goal: to make sure smallholders in his home region could earn a proper living from quality coffee, and to put Northern Peru properly 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 they invest the rest of their energy in education. Agronomy workshops, business training, financing, quality control. They won the SCA's Sustainability Award in 2023 for it. For La Palestina, that partnership has meant phased renovation and replanting across the farm, alongside the introduction of rarer varieties (Gesha, SL9, Bourbon Marshell) and tentative experiments with honey processing. The kind of changes that take real money, real expertise, and a real long-term relationship to pull off.
The results have been quietly remarkable. Coffee trees that ordinarily take three years or more to reach productivity have started producing properly after just one. Pepe and the OCL team describe the yields at La Palestina as "simply astounding", which is a thing you very rarely hear about a smallholder farm.
What you're drinking, then, isn't just one farmer's coffee. It's three generations of one family's patience, the local knowledge of an exporter who grew up in these hills, and a slow, careful, deeply collaborative way of doing things that doesn't get nearly enough airtime in the specialty world. We think it's worth talking about.
