Aponte

This coffee is grown by many smallholders who live in the Resguardo Inga Aponte, and area long home to the Inga indigenous community. A combination of very high altitudes, over 2000masl and ash from the Galeras Volcano makes an extremely complex and sweet coffee.

Aponte is the name of an Inga community high in the mountains of Nariño. This community pre-dates the Spanish conquest and goes back to the days of the Inca. During the conquest they were able to remain largely isolated in their mountain refuge and it wasnt until the later half of the 19th century that they started to integrate into Colombian life. However in the 90’s the community was ravaged by criminal enterprise. Drug traffickers and guerrilla paramilitaries flocked to the remote area, and the Inga people were brutalized and forced into the cultivation of poppies and coca for drug production.

It is only in the last 10 years that the scourge of illegal drug production has been eradicated from the region and cultivation of coffee has come to replace the drug trade. Caturra in particular was planted here. At the time Caturra was the dominant varietal in Colombia, however in the last decade production of Caturra has significantly decreased as farmers replaced Caturra with rust resistant varietals like Castillo and Colombia.