Finca Esperaza Verde

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A wide variety of exotic and fascinating activities await you during your visit to Finca Esperanza Verde and San Ramón. Activities are included in the 2-4 night package tours and the 5-7 night ecotours. Or you may select activities a la carte.

• Cooking class with Dona Adalila.  Nacatamal, a Nicaraguan delicacy enjoyed traditionally on Friday nights with a cup of coffee, is a ground cornmeal and vegetable concoction wrapped tightly in banana leaves, tied with string and boiled for 6 hours. Learn to make this wonderful dish and then enjoy eating it while a group of local musicians entertain you. This activity is best enjoyed when the group is 6 or more people. You also might have a chance to watch as Dona Adalila bakes traditional goodies in her beehive oven.
• Handmade paper demonstration by La Pita Women’s Handmade Paper Cooperative.
  A group of rural women determined to find a way to support themselves and their children, through a United Nations Development Program program, learned how to make paper using corn tassels and husks, banana stalks, dried flowers, old newspapers from the library, and discarded office trash. They are perfectionists and proud of the cards and journals they make to sell to visitors.
• Go bananas! Learn about the life cycle of the banana as our nature guide shows you how a banana tree sprouts, grows to produce a healthy stalk of fruit and then is harvested and turned into material to add to the compost pile.
• Worm composting.  Assist the staff in tending the vermiculture operation. The worms turn all the compost we can feed them into black gold to nourish our coffee plants and garden vegetables.
• Campesino Kitchen. Learn the special skill of making Nicaraguan tortillas from grinding the corn to cooking them on the wood stove. (The visitor whose tortilla puffs up gets admiring smiles from the cooks!) Then learn to roast coffee using a “comal” over the traditional wood stove.
• Picking Coffee (mid-November through January). Your guide will strap your very own basket around your waist. The challenge is to pick only the very red beans (to ensure the highest quality of taste) and to leave the stem, from where the coffee blossoms sprout, on the bush. Remove the stem…..no crop the following year! After you return from the fields, your coffee will be depulped (under your watchful eye!)
• Wet Coffee Mill Processing. (Activity available during coffee harvest.) After the depulped coffee beans have fermented in the vat for a prescribed number of hours (determined by the coffee “mandador” based on the length of time it takes for the coffee to reach the desired degree of fermentation), the coffee is washed (this is where you roll up your sleeves!) and set out to dry. Over the course of the next few days as the coffee dries, you are welcome (after thoroughly washing your hands to remove any bug repellant, perfume, etc.) to join the staff as they sort out defective beans.
• Coffee Cupping. Travel by pick up truck to a neighbor’s farm to meet the family and learn still more about coffee and the life of a coffee farmer. Compare the quality of taste of several different coffees during the “coffee cupping”.
• Jewelry Making. One of the local seed jewelry artists will guide you in making your own necklace, bracelet and earrings from some the exquisite seeds produced by the tropical hardwoods of the region.
• All About Heliconia (e.g. bird of paradise flower). FEV is home to an unusually large number of heliconia. One of the local guides will give a talk about them and explain why FEV has such a proliferation of this exotic flower.
• Talk: by a staff member on how FEV is transforming the lives of the staff and others in the community who benefit from the economic stimulus tourism at FEV provides.
• Talk: on the social and political history of San Ramón.