Alotepeque-Metapán

Alotepeque-Metapán is El Salvador’s smallest coffee range and one of its most decorated. In the far north, around Metapán and in Chalatenango, farmers grow coffee at 1,000–2,000 metres, higher at the bottom than any other region, on barely 2% of the country’s coffee land. It grows more Pacamara than anywhere else in El Salvador, and in 2025 its Pacamaras won the country’s Cup of Excellence.

The short version

• The smallest range: about 2,200 hectares, 1.7% of the coffee area.
• 1,000–2,000 metres, the highest minimum altitude.
• Half Pacas, 15% Pacamara, the most of any region.
• First and second in the 2025 Cup of Excellence washed and honey category.
• Harvest from late February at Los Morales, at 1,800 m.

What does Alotepeque-Metapán coffee taste like?

Floral, by the official description. The denomination of origin Café Alotepec, registered with the Centro Nacional de Registros, covers coffee above 1,000 metres in La Palma, San Ignacio, Citalá, Tejutla, San Fernando, La Reina, San Francisco Morazán and Dulce Nombre de María in Chalatenango, and Metapán in Santa Ana. It describes coffees of excellent cup quality with floral aromas, pleasant and penetrating, and “exotic attributes” in the cup, Marcasur reports. In 2017 the Japanese importer Maruyama Coffee paid US$9,500 a quintal, US$95 a pound, for an Alotepec Pacamara, a former head of the Consejo Salvadoreño del Café told El Diario de Hoy. Finca Los Morales, above 1,800 metres in the Alotepeque range, describes its Pacamara as floral, with honey, panela, black cherry, citric acidity and a silky body, and its Geisha as floral, with lemon, spice, cashew and mint. In the 2025 Cup of Excellence, a honey Pacamara from Santa Rosa won the washed and honey category with 90.93, and one from Los Morales came second with 90.57. Perfect Daily Grind singles out Chalatenango’s microclimate as especially suited to Pacamara.

Varieties and altitude

In 2016 the range grew 50% Pacas, 30% Bourbon, 15% Pacamara and 5% Catuaí and Catimor, at 1,000–2,000 metres, on about 2,200 hectares, the CSC told the ICO. Every other Salvadoran range starts at 500 metres. Pacamara is El Salvador’s own variety, a cross of Pacas and the giant-beaned Maragogype selected by the Salvadoran Institute of Coffee Research, and it “frequently dominates” the country’s Cup of Excellence, World Coffee Research says.

Prize farms

Los Morales lies in the hamlet of Honduritas, in the municipality of Metapán, facing the Montecristo cloud forest at about 14.23°N. The Morales family’s father lost the land in the civil war; his children came back to plant Geisha and Pacamara on 11 of its 45 manzanas, process in their own small mill and dry under a solar tunnel on raised beds. Their harvest begins in late February. Santa Rosa, in Chalatenango, was founded in 1979 but planted with coffee only after El Salvador’s first Cup of Excellence in 2003, with Pacamara under the shade of a replanted pine forest; it has since won first place.

How it compares

Region	Area (2016)	Altitude	Pacamara share
Alotepeque-Metapán	2,200 ha	1,000–2,000 m	15%
Apaneca-Ilamatepec	66,550 ha	500–2,365 m	not listed
El Bálsamo-Quezaltepeque	37,545 ha	500–1,960 m	not listed

Source: CSC presentation to the ICO, 2016.

Alotepeque-Metapán and other Salvadoran origins

• Coffee in El Salvador: the whole country, its six ranges and its history.
• Apaneca-Ilamatepec: the big western range with half the country’s coffee.
• Coffee in Honduras: the neighbour to the north.