About Finca Ciudadela

My grandfather, Asunción Molina, bought Finca Ciudadela in 1975 from his mother-in-law, Mrs. Lidia Adam de Palacios, who inherited the farm from her husband, Mr. Salvador Palacios, who farmed coffee for decades.

In the following years, my father, Emilio Molina Palacios, bought the farm from his father, Asunción Molina, and they worked together in the coffee exportation business and now, my brother and I work the farm together.

During the construction of the artificial Lake Apanás in 1964, Finca Ciudadela was used to house the construction workers, and because of this a small town was created on our land. A small grocery store, campgrounds, meeting room, pharmacy, health center, and even a small bar, gave our property a small-town feel that persists to this day and adds a layer of uniqueness to our farm.

On the farm we have many stories, but my favorite is this: during the 1980s, a time of war in Nicaragua, the farm was taken and occupied by a group of armed men. The group invaded our farm and claimed it. It was lost to us, taken, but my father, Don Emilio, didn’t just let them have it. He went to them and told them that if they did not give back Finca Ciudadela, La Mocuana, a scary character from Nicaraguan folklore that we believe protects our family, would kill each and every one of them, day by day, until there were no more of them left. Because of his threat, my father had to run away as they shot at him.

The next day, we don’t know why, one of the armed men drowned in a stream on the farm, and the rest of the armed men decided they’d had enough of that. They fled from our farm, allowing us to return, and the story made sure that no one tried to steal it from us again.

From those years until 2017, Finca Ciudadela produced 5,000 loads of coffee from the 240 acres of land, and we worked to treat our land and workers well. We took special care to preserve and respect the plants and animals that call our farm home, and we paid our employees fair prices for their work. Our farm was prosperous and well taken care of, yielding many fruits of our labor.

Don Emilio had started restoring certain parts of the camps from the small city on the farm, and had also started construction on a hotel for ecotourism, to share the beauty of Lake Apanás, the waterfalls and luscious land with the world.

But In 2018, the sociopolitical crisis in Nicaragua significantly affected access to bank loans and the drop in coffee prices impoverished coffee farmers all over the country. Finca Ciudadela was in danger again.

We lost many other farms, but we didn’t lose our precious Finca Ciudadela.

Now, My brother Emilio and I are the ones in charge of the farm. Our greatest goal, what we work towards every day, is to improve the quality of our coffee, to take care of and preserve the natural resources our farm possesses, and we are studying the growth and sale of cacao so that we can diversify our crops.