The Legend of Don Tadeo

Just when the injuries of the Santa Monica earthquake were healing, at the beginning of the last century, in the “Very Noble and Loyal City of Cartago”, the title given by the King of Spain to the former capital of the Republic of Costa Rica, was when Don Tadeo, together with other “Cartagos” grew, pruned and looked after the gourmet coffee beans plantation in the legendary Orosi Valley.

As it was custom then, in the middle of the morning, he looked for the shadow of a guava tree near the majestic Grande River of Orosi and took out from his hardened leather knapsack, the delicious “burra” (snack) that during the dawn hours, his wife Dona Adoracion, had prepared in the wood stove.

Those sturdy hands, hardened by work, opened with delicacy the cooked plantain leaves to leave uncovered the rice, beans and omelet, the yellow corn tortillas and the ripe plantain. Later he satisfied his thirst with the juice of a sour orange, sweetened with “miel de tapa” (sugar cane).

After that he deserved a rest, just for some minutes, no more, but enough to admire the hills bordering the eastern bank of the Grande River, the slopes and Costa Rican coffee hills that had bewitched him.

It was so that Don Tadeo, in the hilly terrain of considerable height over the sea level, without knowing then that they were exceptional for the cultivation of gourmet coffee beans, began growing his Costa Rican coffee up from the eastern bank of the river. As his children remember, big holes were required, filled with organic compost taken from the same land. These holes that were left open for several months before growing the wholesale gourmet coffee plants. They had to keep the plantation clean, with shovel trimmings of the roots and in the collecting time in the month of December, under heavy rains, the collection of just dark red gourmet coffee beans took place. Then on the back of Costa Rican coffee mules that went down the hills with mud up to the belly, by the roads till the border of the Grande River and then by oxen wagons transported up to the mill “Beneficio” La Anita in the Orosi Valley.

This stimulated him to grow gourmet coffee beans at an altitude of more than 1,400 meters over the level of the sea, which evidence is found nowadays in its natural Costa Rican coffee state.

As the legend goes, at nights and dawns, when the wholesale gourmet coffee farmers went to their jobs, with a charcoal lamp to lighten, the “cuyeos” (birds found along the roads resting at night), tempted the Costa Rican coffee hikers to follow them so the specialty coffee elves could get them in the deepest part of the forested gourmet coffee beans plantation and made them get lost.

The Costa Rican coffee descendents of Don Tadeo, making good use of the gift mother nature had given them and taking advantage of the good land and privileged climate for the gourmet coffee beans cultivation, continue, first his son and then the grandson, with the tradition of growing wholesale gourmet coffee in harmony with nature, in this hilly and rolling terrain on the eastern bank of the Grande River and the western bank of the Palomo River at the beginning of the Talamanca Range, precisely where the Tapanti National Park is located.

This, as well as the height and coolness of the zone, the interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, the quantity of light, the quality of the Costa Rican coffee soils and the conservative management of them, keeps the exclusive quality of the legendary coffee, Don Tadeo. As a matter of fact, destiny fulfills its goals, the Beneficio La Anita is named after the former owner, Dona Anita Anselmo de la Troya, related to General Francisco Morazan, and someone of her generation marries one from Don Tadeo’s third generation and the gourmet coffee beans cycle is complete; producer, miller and exporter of wholesale gourmet coffee all together.