Totutla

I found Totutla by accident, the way I find most of the places I end up loving. I was working my way through the coffee country above Huatusco, taking whatever road looked greenest, and the road that looked greenest climbed and climbed into cloud and delivered me, damp and delighted, into a small town wrapped in fog and the smell of roasting beans. I stopped for a coffee — obviously — and the woman who served it grew it herself, up the slope behind the town, and by the time I’d finished the cup I’d more or less decided to stay the night.

Totutla sits high in the central Veracruz sierra, in the belt of steep, rain-soaked mountains where some of Mexico’s best coffee grows. This is not the dry highland Mexico most people picture; it is green to the point of extravagance, the slopes so steep and so densely planted that the coffee seems to hang off the hillsides. Fog is the default weather. It comes and goes all day, closing the mountains down to a soft grey and then opening again to show you how much green there was all along.

The Coffee Slopes

Coffee is not an industry here so much as the shape of the land. The fincas run right down the mountainsides around the town, the low glossy coffee bushes growing in the shade of taller trees, and in harvest season the slopes fill with pickers moving through the rows with baskets, the red cherries coming off the branches by hand. It is hard, wet, steep work, and the coffee that results is worth taking seriously.

I walked up one of the finca tracks in a fine drifting rain that wasn’t quite rain, more a suspension of water in the air, and the whole slope was dripping and green and alive with sound — birds I couldn’t see, water moving somewhere below, the soft thud of cherries into a basket further up the hill. A man drying beans on a patio waved me over and let me smell the different lots, the washed and the natural, and talked about altitude and shade and the price the buyers pay, which is never enough. I came away with a bag of his beans and a much better understanding of what’s in the cup.

Fog and the Town

Totutla lives inside weather. The town is small and steep, its streets climbing and falling with the terrain, and the cloud moves through it constantly — one moment you can see across the valley to the far slopes, the next the fog is down in the streets and the buildings a few doors along have gone soft and grey. I loved it. There’s an intimacy to a town wrapped in cloud, a sense of the world shrunk down to the block you’re standing on.

I spent the evening on a covered terrace watching the fog come and go over the rooftops, a coffee going cold beside me because I kept forgetting to drink it, too absorbed in the light. The air was cool and wet and smelled of woodsmoke and coffee and the green all around. People came and went under umbrellas, unhurried, used to the damp. This is a place that has made its peace with rain, and there’s something restful in that — no one here is waiting for the weather to change, because the weather is simply what the place is.

The Green Country Around

The mountains around Totutla are some of the greenest I’ve seen in Mexico, and the pleasure of the place is partly just in moving slowly through them. The roads wind along the contours of the slopes, past fincas and small settlements and sudden drops into ravines choked with vegetation, streams running fast and cold at the bottom. Everything is steep. Everything drips. Everything grows.

I took a slow drive out of town the next morning, before the day’s cloud had fully built, and the mountains were doing that thing they do here in the early light — half in sun, half in mist, the green almost violent in its intensity where the light hit it. I stopped at a bend where a stream crossed under the road and just listened to the water for a while. Huatusco and the bigger coffee towns are close by, but Totutla itself stays quiet, off to the side of the main routes, and that quietness is exactly its gift. It asks nothing of you but to slow down and breathe the wet green air.

Getting There

Totutla lies in the coffee mountains of central Veracruz, most easily reached from Huatusco, a short drive away, which is itself connected by bus to Córdoba and Xalapa. From the city of Veracruz or from Córdoba you can reach the area by bus and then continue by local colectivo, though a car makes exploring the surrounding fincas and mountain roads far easier — and safer on the wet, winding slopes. Bring a rain layer whatever the season; this is cloud-forest country and the fog and drizzle are part of the deal year-round, heaviest in the summer rains. Come for the coffee, and stay for the green.