Crickets chirrup as you wake up cocooned within an expansive working coffee estate replete with bananas and breadfruit, and rimmed by the pines that lend the coffee beans cultivated here their unique taste. The five tucked-away casitas (self-contained villas) are touchingly decorated. Recline on the verandas in the hammocks, then wander up to the restaurant for an exquisite breakfast.
The coffee gown on-site is the breakfast highlight, but the pancakes, omelettes or piles of fresh fruit help make a memorable start to the day. In the grounds alone there are short hikes, coffee tours and tastings, and more hammock-swinging to do, and one of the island's most splendid forests, the Reserva Forestal Toro Negro, begins a few kilometers to the east.
The ethos with this place is that you can experience coffee grown in the traditional way – without fertilizers – and the result is a tasteful throwback to what a hacienda must have been like in the island's 19th-century glory days.
