The family recently planted banana trees alongside their coffee for shade. The soil is predominantly loam with a few pockets of clay. The landscape of the farm is varied, but mostly flat. Don Zenon, who is originally from the municipality of Córdoba, bought La Fortuna over 40 years ago. Tangua neighbors the municipality of Yacuanquer, another coffee-producing community where Azahar sources most of our Nariño coffees. La Fortuna sits at 1,800 m.a.s.l, in the vereda of Nascan. Bettine’s son Eiver Juliano Obando, also lives with his mother and grandfather at the family farm and sometimes helps with farm chores. This upcoming May, they have plans to plant an additional 5,800 coffee trees. She leaves La Fortuna around 5:30 in the morning and arrives in the capital two hours later. In order to deliver the eggs, as well as their parchment coffee during the harvest season, Bettine takes a form of public transport common throughout rural Colombia called a chiva or bus escalera, which is a type of brightly painted, open-air (the windows do not have panes) bus. Today, besides coffee, Bettine and Zenon also raise quails and sell their eggs to several supermarkets in Nariño’s capital city of Pasto. Bettine explained to us that her family has always cultivated coffee, but before it was “just for the household”, and other crops such as rye and corn, were their main forms of income. La Fortuna spans a total surface area of five and half hectares, one of which is planted with the Castillo variety, approximately 5,000 trees. Don Zenon and Bettine live and grow coffee at their finca La Fortuna, located in the municipality of Tangua, in the department of Nariño. Zenon Tacan Ceron has five daughters, but only one, the oldest, Bettine, has followed in her father’s footsteps and become a coffee grower.

La finca de zenon