San Marcos

San Marcos is Guatemala’s hottest, wettest coffee region and, by the agriculture ministry’s last count, its biggest coffee department. Volcanic, remote and humid, it gets up to 5,000 mm of rain a year, flowers before anywhere else, and produces a coffee that Anacafé describes as floral, with a pronounced acidity.

The short version

• The warmest and wettest of Guatemala’s eight regions.
• Up to 5,000 mm of rain a year.
• The earliest flowering in Guatemala.
• Floral notes, pronounced acidity, good body.
• The biggest coffee department: 16% of the crop in 2016.

What does San Marcos coffee taste like?

Anacafé describes delicate floral notes in both aroma and taste, a pronounced acidity and good body.

The growing conditions

Anacafé’s profile, converted from feet, inches and °F:

	San Marcos
Altitude	1,310–1,830 m (4,300–6,000 ft)
Rainfall	4,060–5,080 mm (160–200 in)
Temperature	21–27 °C (70–81 °F)
Humidity	70–80%

Source: Anacafé, Guatemalan Coffees.

It is the warmest of the eight regions and has the highest rainfall, Anacafé says. The rains arrive earlier than elsewhere, so the coffee flowers earliest.

Drying in the rain

San Marcos is remote, and most of its coffee is grown on farms with their own mills. Because rain is unpredictable during the harvest, much of the coffee is pre-dried in the sun and finished in a Guardiola dryer, Anacafé says. The wet, warm lower slopes have their problems too: in 2025 Anacafé found the twig-boring beetle Xylosandrus compactus in San Marcos, among other departments, at 600–900 metres, including in some robusta trees, USDA reports.

How it compares

San Marcos is at the wet, warm end of Guatemala’s range, by Anacafé’s figures:

Region	Rainfall	Temperature	Humidity
San Marcos	4,060–5,080 mm	21–27 °C	70–80%
Cobán	3,050–4,060 mm	15–20 °C	85–95%
Fraijanes	1,520–3,050 mm	12–26 °C	70–90%
Huehuetenango	1,220–1,420 mm	20–24 °C	70–80%
Antigua	810–1,220 mm	18–22 °C	65%

Cobán is more humid, but no region is wetter. Anacafé calls San Marcos the warmest of the eight, though its own figures give Acatenango a higher maximum, 31 °C. That warmth and wet matter for disease: across Guatemala, leaf rust incidence reached 20% between January and March 2025, when it was wetter and warmer than usual, USDA says.

How much coffee does it grow?

More than any other department, in the agriculture ministry’s 2016 figures: 16% of Guatemala’s coffee on 15% of its harvested coffee area, ahead of Santa Rosa (15%) and Suchitepéquez (9%).

San Marcos and other Guatemalan origins

• Coffee in Guatemala: the whole country and its eight regions.
• Huehuetenango: the highest and driest non-volcanic region.
• Antigua: the protected volcanic valley.