Manuel and his mango

When I told people at the intercambio that we were going on a tour of a coffee plantation today, they were shocked. No, we didn't fly anywhere -- Manuel has the only coffee farm in Europe, just ten minutes' drive up the hills behind us. S was delighted to discover that the four other people on our tour were ... Catalans from Girona. How likely is that? Chat in Catalan ensued, and he invited them to his book event in Girona next month.

Manuel is a cheerful chap, and the two-hour tour was really interesting.  His grandfather was a pioneer in growing avocados and mangos here, and he has the oldest mango tree on the Iberian peninsula, planted in 1977. Manuel started out as a barista and learned all about coffee. He clearly takes after his grandad, because when he was told coffee could not be grown in Europe, he immediately planted some seeds to see what would happen. Since then he's also planted many other unlikely crops on his highly diverse four hectares. Lemongrass, kaffir lime, lychees, tamarind, pineapples, sugar cane (used in a local rum), even coconut, as well as the more mainstream mango, avocado, and chirimoya ... here is Manuel and his avocado (a fragile and unsaleable variety) and Manuel and his dragonfruit (hand-pollinated at the dead of night because that's when the flowers open, and the requisite bats are not available where he is).

We learned lots of interesting stuff. Coffee beans ripen at different rates, so the same bush can have both ripe and unripe beans, plus flowers. You either pick meticulously by hand, or suck them all off with a machine and then sort them by chromatology. The ripe red beans go to the best brands, the slightly less ripe to middle market brands, the yellow to supermarket own brands ... "And what do you think happens to the unripe green ones? Into capsules with artificial flavourings!" he grinned. He urged on us the importance of buying fair trade coffee to avoid exploitation of mostly female workers and we did, of course, buy a bag of his coffee at the end of the tour. We finished at his finca, which has been in his family for 300 years. It was a really worthwhile visit, highly recommended.

This has been the first dismal day weatherwise in weeks. Luckily it stayed mostly dry during our visit, with just a few drops of rain, but this afternoon defied the forecast with a persistent drizzle, so we stayed at home for the rest of the day. And now we've got the small but super efficient fan heater out.