by Melanie McGrath
The Kuhls found themselves in Nicaragua more or less by accident
On the face of it, their home city of Hamburg, Germany didn’t have much in common with the cloud-forested mountains of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, where the Kuhls eventually settled. All the same, they found they were happy there.
The move was Hans Bosch’s idea. Well, not his exactly. During the 1870s Bosch had been poking around Central America looking for gold when he fell into conversation with a Nicaraguan official who suggested he give up the hunt for gold, return to Germany and bring back some hardy souls who’d be willing to cultivate coffee in Nicaragua. At the time, coffee was not much grown in Central America but the official knew that northern Nicaragua would provide the perfect conditions for it. Why mine for gold, the official said, when you can grow it?
The Kuhls were one of the families who thought that sounded good. They had no experience in growing coffee but they knew how Germans liked their coffee, they thought that Germany would be a good market, and they were brave and enterprising enough to want to give it a go. The first Kuhl coffee farm was built in 1884 and by 1890, the Kuhls were already exporting coffee beans back to Germany. They called the farm La Hammonia, after the Latin for Hamburg, and the area around they named Selva Negra or Black Forest. The Nicaraguan Selva Negra looks nothing whatsoever like its German namesake, but no matter. More than a century on, the hacienda still produces some of the finest high altitude, shade grown, organic arabica coffee beans in the world.
The reason I’m telling you this is, of course, because you can stay with the Kuhls at Selva Negra, in your own little bungalow, surrounded by some of the last remaining pristine dry tropical cloud forest left in Central America.
The original La Hammonia farmhouse still sits high among the hacienda’s 1500 acres of primary cloud forest, secondary cloud forest protecting shade grown coffee plantations and green sweeping arable land. It’s as though the winds blew a bit of Europe half way round the world and dropped it among the monkeys and bromeliads.
From the windows of the farmhouse, Eddie and Mausi Kuhl and their family, have a fine and direct view of the Beneficio, a tumble of warehousing and plant like something Indiana Jones might have discovered, where the ripe red coffee cherries are first brought to be sorted and washed. This proximity is one of many things that set La Hammonia apart. Only three coffee haciendas in Nicaragua are still family-owned and run on-site by their owners.
The mountains around Selva Negra really are my favorite part of Nicaragua. After the grilling pacific lowlands of León and Chinandega, the road from Matalgalpa to Jinotega strikes me as a pathway to heaven; so cool is the high mountain air. Driving is a joy, passing, as you do, steeply graduated limestone mountains in such strange, layered formations that every curve in the road reveals a new and unexpected panorama. And the color! You have never seen green until you have visited the Nicaraguan north. This isn’t just emerald green. It is what green would be if you were to take every emerald in the world and boil them down to a spot of color the size of a thumbprint.
Under Eddie and Maui Kuhl’s care, La Hammonia has become one of the most diversified (probably the most diversified) farms in Central America. It has also won international awards for environmental innovation. The Kuhls grow their coffee under cloud forest canopy, which provides vital corridors for wildlife. Nearly half the Kuhl’s acreage - good, solid coffee-growing land - has been left as untouched primary cloud forest.
Almost nothing produced at the farm is wasted. The water used to wash the coffee berries is sent to feed pastureland for cattle or piped to the greenhouses for the Kuhl’s flower business. The coffee bean husks are composted and returned as fertilizer to the coffee bushes. Some of what remains is used to grow the vegetables and fruits used to feed the farm’s 250 employees (during coffee picking season the number of workers on the farm can swell to 700). The rest is processed to produce methane for roasting the coffee beans and for keeping the tortilla machine in the kitchen running. By February, after the coffee has been harvested, methane is processed from cattle dung. Pig manure, which can’t be used to produce methane, goes into a giant tank filled with composting worms and emerges months later as rich, odorless and most importantly, organic fertilizer. Even the soapy laundry water is recycled and used as a surfactant for the plant-based insecticides used on the coffee bushes.
You can learn all this for yourself, and a good deal more, with demonstrations on a tour of the farm. In all likelihood your tour guide will be the delightful, multilingual hacienda matriarch, Mausi Kuhl herself.
Some few years ago, the Kuhls’ diversification plans extended into tourism and they have been running Selva Negra Mountain Resort ever since. For around $50 a night you can rent one of the resort’s cozy little wood and brick bungalows discreetly set in the forest. The bungalows are neither large nor luxurious but how better to spend an evening than to settle into one of the rocking chairs on the little porch with a drink and watch the sun fade from the air between the hardwoods as the night frogs start up their songs?
The Kuhls have larger chalets with up to five bedrooms available too. For those who prefer the services that come with hotel accommodation, the rooms in the main resort building work out around the same price as a chalet. With typical generosity (it can’t add much to their bank balance), Eddie and Mausi have even built a dormitory that welcomes students, backpackers and anyone else on a tight budget.
Wherever you choose to stay, you are guaranteed to sleep like lumber. Selva Negra is situated at nearly 3000ft so it never gets really hot and the evenings are blissfully cool.
By day there are 14 well-kept and well-signed (but still wild) trails to explore and a keen walker can easily delve deep into one of last remaining areas of tropical dry cloud forest. If you go no further than the trailhead, you are guaranteed to see at least some of the 130 bird species that make the area their home. Among them might be the Three-Wattled bellbird, The Dot-Winged Ant wren, the resplendent Quetzal and the White-Eared hummingbird. In all likelihood, a ten-minute walk will bring you to an overhead patrol of howler monkeys who will be happy to let you know just how they feel about you. (In general, howlers don’t appreciate human beings traversing their territory, however politely, and have been known to chuck lumps of their own shit at passersby. Don’t worry though, they’re lousy shots.) If you are able to persuade a guide to accompany you along one of the more remote hiking trails at night, you stand a small chance of seeing puma, ocelot and sloth. If you really can’t face a hike, there are horses for hire that will do the walking bit of the job for you, leaving you free to suck up the scenery.
Even if you see nothing more exciting than a pigeon, the forest itself is profoundly peaceful. Nothing brings home quite so forcefully how lucky you are to be alive than walking among trees that were pushing out their young roots as Columbus sailed into the New World.
After all that walking and looking you’ll be hungry. The Kuhls serve German sized (and that really does mean big) meals on a rustic wooden terrace overlooking a little lake. Much of the food is produced right there on the farm. It’s not sophisticated, perhaps it’s not as good as it could be, but there’s plenty of it. Leave room to sample the German cakes, which really are luscious, especially when they are helped down with a cup of some of the best coffee you’ll ever taste. The Kuhls also make rather expensive farmhouse cheeses and will be happy to sell you some. Don’t let price put you off. After the rubber blubber which passes for queso in most of the rest of Nicaragua, every bite of Selva Negra cheese tastes as good as gold.
Do not leave without touring La Hammonia. Eddie and Mausi Kuhl make delightful, knowledgeable and wholeheartedly decent hosts and the place is an inspiring example of what a family farm should and can be; a good employer, a responsible producer, and a gentle presence on the land. In its own way, as inspiring as the forest around it.
