Our day was a tour of various towns along the Ruta de las Flores. The route is named that in honor of the large number of coffee flowers that can be seen in their season. The combination of altitude and volcanic soil makes this area of the country a prime coffee-growing location.
So we were able to stop by several small towns, both to do some shopping and to check out these very pretty locales. And in the first place we stopped at was also home to a cultural center where they are working to save crafts and ways of life indigenous to the area that were very close to dying out.
After lunch we had a tour of a coffee mill. The owners also run a coffee farm, but this tour focused on the operation of receiving the coffee from other farmers and preparing it for sale (and probable export). We were all a little surprised at the intensive labor involved. While the mill had a lot of automated equipment (dating back to the 1930s), manual labor was needed to pick, test, dry, sort, and move the beans around. El Salvador has suffered from a disease of the coffee plants for the past few years, so even though this is in the harvest season, they only had about half as many workers as usual.
At the end of the tour we had the chance to try some of the coffee, made using a cotton filter. There seemed to be some mixed results of this tasting, though the divide largely fell depending on if you drink coffee or not. ;)
After the tour we made our way back to San Salvador for our closing ceremonies and to brace ourselves for the return to the frozen North.
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