Argovia
Sometimes, you just have to reinvent yourself.
A century-old coffee plantation high in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, Finca Argovia has been reinvented a time or two in the last 140 years. The sprawling mountainside farm is home to rows of coffee beans, a sort of jungle-garden with more than 150 types of tropical flowers, and a boutique resort and spa.
Bruno Giersermann, the fourth-generation owner, knew long ago that reinvention was key to Finca Argovia’s success. His family developed Argovia as a coffee plantation around the turn of the 19th century. But, when the coffee industry suffered in the 1980s, Bruno saw an opportunity to diversify the business and to breathe life into the ecosystem that had once existed there.
He went to work turning his family’s coffee plantation back into a rainforest – where they also grow coffee. Bruno’s team re-planted the mountainside his family has stewarded for generations. They started using hydroelectric energy they generate to process their coffee beans, and they built the only wastewater treatment plant of its kind in Mexico. At Argovia Finca, regeneration and conservation are top priorities – priorities that also help create a wildly lush environment where coffee beans, flowers, the land, and the people thrive.
