Анатолий
Анатольевич
Eфремов

A coffee town

Adjuntas is a small coffee town in the Valley of the Sleeping Giant high in the mountains of Puerto Rico. It is about two hours by car westward from the capital of the country, San Juan.

A deep love of the land and its customs fills Adjuntas. Local people say their families have lived in this town ‘since forever’. Time flows slowly and peacefully. The citizens do not like changes, they value a simple and steady life and observe traditions.

To save their traditional lifestyle, several years ago, the local people had to fight their own government in order to prevent a destructive business initiative. The thing is that the mountains surrounding Adjuntas are rich with gold, silver and zinc and the Puerto Rican government wanted to start mining for these mineral resources. It meant that large areas of green woods and lots of freshwater lakes would disappear.

People fought to keep their land untouched despite the promise of new jobs and high salaries. The citizens of the town preferred making money from their traditional business – growing coffee and selling it all around Puerto Rico and even abroad. The government agreed to meet their demands and transformed the mining project into a national park, El Bosque del Pueblo. Opened in 1998, the park runs a special eco programme where the young and old people of Adjuntas plant trees and take care of them. ‘Learning to manage the forest has been a wonderful new experience for us,’ said Tinti Deya, a 67-year-old local resident. ‘It’s another world where we’re like children doing everything for the first time, we forget that we’re already grandmothers.’

Grandmothers are everywhere in Adjuntas and they’re all respectfully addressed as Dofia. Lala Echevarria, an 85-year-old great-great-grandmother, was born on the oldest street, where she still lives in a small, clean and tidy home. Dofia Lala grew up before there was electricity and running water, and remembers when the first car arrived in Adjuntas. ‘As a child, I used to spend all my time carrying water, looking for firewood, looking after the chickens and the cows,’ she said. ‘There were sixteen of us. We would wash our clothes in the river and we used to cook on an open fire. At meal times, we kids would sit on the floor to eat.’ Dofia Lala was working as a cleaning lady when she met and married the love of her life, Mariano, the mechanic. They had thirteen children and shared 44 years of happiness before he died in 1983. Such life stories are common in Adjuntas.