Things to Do in Antigua Guatemala Around a Antigua Coffee Morning

Every coffee morning here finishes by lunchtime, which leaves you a UNESCO-listed colonial town and an afternoon to spend in it. Antigua was inscribed in 1979 under criteria (ii), (iii) and (iv) and sits at 1,500 metres above sea level. It looks the way it does because an earthquake in 1773 emptied it. This is what fits around a coffee tour Antigua Guatemala.

How a coffee morning fits the rest of your day

You are back in town between eleven and one. That is enough for lunch, a long afternoon and one more thing in the evening. It is also why booking the coffee for your first full day works so well: you arrive at the plaza already knowing what the valley grows.

What does not fit is a volcano. Acatenango is climbed overnight and Pacaya takes a whole afternoon and evening, so put those on a different day.

Santa Catalina Arch

The yellow arch on 5a Avenida Norte, with Volcán de Agua framed through it on a clear morning. It was built so cloistered nuns could cross the street unseen, and it is the single most photographed object in Guatemala. Go before eight or accept that you are in a queue.

Parque Central and the cathedral

The plaza the town is laid out around, with the fountain at its centre and the cathedral on the east side. The church you enter from the square is the working part; behind it the older nave is roofless, and walking into it is the clearest picture anywhere of what the 1773 earthquake did here.

Cerro de la Cruz

The cross on the hill at the north end of town, and the view that puts the whole grid below you with Agua closing the horizon. Twenty to thirty minutes up on foot by a stepped path. The ATV coffee tour drives up and gives it twenty minutes, which is the easiest way to see it.

The convent ruins

Las Capuchinas, Santa Clara, La Recolección and the rest: roofless cloisters and cracked vaults left where the earthquake put them. They are the reason the town is on the World Heritage list rather than simply pretty, and most charge a small admission.

La Merced

The mustard-yellow church two blocks north-west of the plaza, and the best surviving example of the earthquake-proof Baroque the town invented — squat, thick-walled and covered in white plasterwork. The fountain in its cloister is said to be the largest in Central America.

Jocotenango and San Felipe de Jesús

The two villages immediately north, both on coffee-tour itineraries. Jocotenango holds Finca La Azotea; San Felipe is a handicrafts village where the bike tour spends ninety minutes in the market and the church is worth the walk on its own.

The volcanoes

Acatenango is climbed overnight and Pacaya in an afternoon, and both are sold on every corner. Neither fits in the same day as a coffee tour, which is precisely why the coffee morning is the thing to book on the day you arrive or the day you come down.

A day built around a coffee morning

Two days lets you take an estate morning and a smallholding morning, and see how differently one crop is worked. The itinerary guide builds three versions of the day, and the visiting page covers what each morning costs.

Getting between all of it

On foot, almost entirely. Antigua is a grid of about twenty blocks and nothing in the centre is more than fifteen minutes' walk. The cobbles argue with wheeled luggage and thin soles, and tuk-tuks cover the longer hops for a few quetzales.

The villages the farms sit in are ten to thirty minutes out by road: Jocotenango, Ciudad Vieja and San Pedro Las Huertas. Every departure but one includes that transport. The farms page sets out which goes where, and Antigua Coffee Tours compares them all.