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Costa Rica | Aquiares Experience | A Taste of Aquiares

Costa Rica | Aquiares Experience | A Taste of Aquiares

Top Costa Rica Ecotours
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Highlights

- Complete Coffee Tour, from the seed to the cup
- Authentic, unique and personalized tours with local guides
- Be part of our coffee community and visit our village
- Opportunity to swim in a huge waterfall
- Discover Aquiares' secrets

Overview

Come to Aquiares and learn all about coffee, from the seed to your cup!

Duration: 2 hours

Agenda:

  • Welcome at the Aquiares church (15 min)
  • Walk through the community and then learn all about coffee agronomy (30 min)
  • Coffee tour at the beneficio, coffee roasting and cupping (1 hour)
  • Visit to the shop and cafeteria (15 min)

You will be part of our community for 2 hours! Or more if you decide to stay 🙂

Schedule: 9am or 2pm

Included: Free coffee tasting

We hope you decide on discovering Costa Rica’s best kept secret!

Photo Gallery

Ethics

At Terra Incognita we support tours that do good in the world. They must help conserve the environment, support local people and provide educational opportunities for guests and staff, or be actively working to improve in these areas.

What conservation activities do you support through the tour, and your wider operations?

Aquiares has become an international leader in environmental sustainability.
As the largest Rainforest Certified Coffee Farm in Costa Rica, it is a pioneer in sustainable practices applied on a large agricultural scale. In the past decades the farm has planted more than 50,000 shade trees, creating natural buffers around streams and water springs. It has worked to preserve the river valleys as forest, planting along the contours of the hills.
The resurgent shade trees also transform what would be a monoculture environment into a holistic natural landscape. This allows the farms rich biome to continue regular life patterns with minimal human interruption. As noted in a New York Times article, Aquiares recently played host to a group of naturalists. In their report, they noted that the extensive variety of shade trees and the buffer zones around streams significantly increase overall biodiversity. Within the farm are found ocelots, armadillos, squirrels, coyotes, sloths, dozens of bird species, and countless other fauna.

Aquiares is model farm of Rainforest Alliance Certification. This eco-label guarantees that Aquiares meets a series of rigorous social and environmental standards that are verified annually by experienced inspectors. Aquiares obtained its first certification in 2003, and has since then received yearly scores of over 950 points out of 1,000.

In 2012, Aquiares became the first farm in Costa Rica to fulfill the requirements of the Rainforest Alliance Climate Module. The Module requires adherence to careful standards of greenhouse gas emissions and energy use, which are carefully tracked each season. This certification demonstrates that the farm’s low emissions do not meaningfully contribute to climate change.

The ecological success of Aquiares has made it not only a model for the Rainforest Alliance, but an industry leader in sustainability.

Representatives from Starbucks, Kraft, and even the U.S. Congress have visited the farm to see coffee cultivation coexisting with conservation.

Forest are protected - Rivers, soils and wildlife are conserved - Workers are treated with respect, paid fairly, and properly equipped - All employees have access to education and medical care.

Aquiares was recently honored to be included in the Costa Rican Coffee NAMA (Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action). The initiative is an international collaboration that provides technical assistance to coffee mills interested in battling climate change.

The Aquiares team has generated a greenhouse gas emissions inventory. This reflects the use of petroleum products, biomass combustion, fertilizer and other emissions resulting from the farm’s operation.

In a different project, a Forestry Consulting firm has helped Aquiares measure the absorption of greenhouse gases by the farm’s flora. To do this, 50 individual growing plots have been established tree diameter and new annual growth is measured. The Aquiares End Balance (emitting or sequestering) will be verified by a certified agent under the IPCC 14065 norm. With this knowledge, Aquiares will be able to accurately target carbon reductions in farm operation and will hopefully offer other companies carbon bonds to aid in their own internal carbon neutrality commitment.

Aquiares has been home to research studies for decades, starting with early sociological studies in the 1950’s. More recently, Aquiares has been the site for several ongoing environmental research projects.

In 2007, the farm was among the very first to try to calculate its carbon balance. Today, Aquiares is the main test plot for an ongoing project between the CIRAD Institute from France and CATIE University from Costa Rica. The “Carbon-Flux project” measures greenhouse gas exchange between the farm plot and the atmosphere over long-time horizons. This research station is the only one of its kind in the world, capable of accurately measuring the emission-sequestration balance of a hectare of shaded coffee.

With this tool, the researchers are trying to develop a model that can be used by coffee farms around the world to estimate their own carbon sequestration potential. This project is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change research efforts.

In 2013, Aquiares begin a partnership program with Cornell University. The goal is to provide an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to gain some practice field experience on the farm. In this short time, the interns have already helped shape the farm’s agricultural strategy and community relations.

In a recent project, a Cornell intern studied the community and noticed increasing levels of type 2 diabetes in the community. Following that research, it was concluded that diet remained an issue for the community and another intern planned and developed a community organic vegetable garden. The farm donated land for the garden and now a group of local women run the garden as a small business.
The relationship with Cornell University has proven to be a win-win. Students are able to immerse themselves in the world of coffee production, and the farm is able to absorb modern knowledge from bright, young students.

How does the tour support local people?

There is a strong and symbiotic relationship between the coffee company and the community. The community lives in the village, situated at the center of the coffee farm. It's an indepedent community rounds with the private coffee company.
The community of Aquiares sits in the midst of the farm and is home to almost 2,000 people. The town boasts a century-old primary school, a youth sports program, a recycling committee, an early childhood nutrition center, and a church built in 1925, which is a National Architectural Historic Monument.
In the 1990s, the farm began a campaign to improve home ownership in the local community. Each worker was given a bonus for their years of service and the farm gave assistance to people applying for government loans. Today 96% of the Aquiares employees own their own houses.
The farm and the community are mutually connected. The farm provides services, land, security and honest jobs. In return, the coffee farm has benefited from a well-educated community and relies on highly skilled professionals from its community to continue functioning. Such a level of interdependence has helped contribute to the sense of pride that Aquiareños take in both our community and our coffee.
Women’s organic vegetable garden
Locally grown food not only tastes better, it also employs hardworking women in rural areas. Because of this, Aquiares partnered with Cornell University to develop a garden which they would manage as an entrepreneurial venture. The ladies in charge received guidance from a Cornell intern and have done a great job growing only organic vegetables which are sold to local families, restaurants and supermarkets.
Aquiares Mountain Biking Club
With extensive gravel roads and jungle paths around, our club "Coffee-Cletos" has formed around our passion for MTB; representing the Aquiares community in events throughout Costa Rica and hosting an annual bike meet inside the Aquiares farm has been a proud task.
Aquiares’ Church Youth Club
United by a common spiritual endeavor, our group of 40 pre-teens & teens has decided to make social responsibility fun! We organize fund-raisers, culinary fairs and other activities to help those that need it the most, and also keep our lives healthy by spreading happiness to those around us.

What type of environmental education activities do you incorporate into your tour?

Learn about coffee production at Costa Rica's largest coffee farm on this guided tour. At the Aquiares Estate, you’ll see the process from seed to cup after visiting the local community and hearing about coffee agronomy and its importance to Costa Rica. Then, learn about coffee roasting and cupping and get a taste.

Certificates

Rainforest Alliance, Carbon Neutral

Top 5 achievements

1. We grow coffee with trees. The farm is 80% coffee plantation and 20% forest.

2. Our Carbon Neutral certification, for which it was difficult to have it, because it was a process of 1 year.

3. Producing coffee without fermentation, that earn 50% of the water we were using 5 years ago.

4. We work with the youth association to do sensibilisation about recycling.

5. We always use paper cups to serve our coffee.

What new sustainability steps or initiatives do you plan to take next?

This year we will work with 2 students of the local university to develop homestay and cultural tours of cooking and handcraft in the community.

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Company Name

Aquiares

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About Company

Aquiares, one of Costa Rica’s most historic coffee farms, sits high on the slopes of the Turrialba Volcano.

The largest coffee farm in Costa Rica, Aquiares devotes 80% of its land to growing high quality coffee and the remaining 20% to conservation. Coffee plots are interlaced with over a dozen natural springs and almost 20 kilometers in streams, all protected with buffer zones in line with our Rainforest Alliance certification. These streams form a network of natural corridors through the farm that connect the large protected forests in the two river valleys, providing a healthy environment for the local animals, birds, and plants.

Tour Website

Click to visit the tour website

Cost

29$ adult and 15$ child

Group size

Minimum 2 / maximum 15 (per guide)

info@aquiares.com
www.aquiares.com

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    About Terra Incognita

    We believe that ecotourism can be a powerful force for good in the world, and seek to promote the best examples of ecotourism worldwide.

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    Our vision is a world where tourism drives positive change for people and wildlife.

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