For nearly half a century, the Nunes family has cultivated coffee at Fajã dos Vimes using methods inherited from earlier generations. More than 1,500 plants now grow in an extraordinary microclimate where sea spray, fruit trees and flowering incense help give the coffee a character inseparable from the place itself.
Coffee seems almost an improbable crop on an island in the middle of the North Atlantic. Yet at Fajã dos Vimes, on São Jorge, coffee plants grow between the mountain and the sea, sheltered within a small landscape whose climate has allowed a tradition brought from distant shores to survive for generations. For the Nunes family, what began with a few plants already growing on land purchased 48 years ago has become both a family inheritance and one of the fajã’s most distinctive attractions.
“When we bought the property, there were coffee plants there,” recalls Alzira Nunes, one of those responsible for Café Nunes. At first, the beans were harvested simply for the family’s own consumption. Her husband’s enthusiasm gradually expanded the cultivation, and when the family constructed a new building connected to Alzira’s weaving work, they decided to open a small bar. There was little else available in Fajã dos Vimes, so they began serving the coffee they grew themselves. Today, after recovering parcels that once belonged to parents and grandparents, the family tends more than 1,500 coffee plants.
Little about the process has surrendered to industrialization. The cherries do not ripen simultaneously and are generally harvested between March and August, individually, when they reach their proper red color. They are slowly dried in the sun and stored until needed. Alzira’s husband shells the beans, which are then selected by hand, one by one. Even roasting remains strikingly ancestral: the beans are roasted in an iron frying pan, much as earlier generations did. Mechanization has been considered, but the scale of production and cost of equipment make it impractical. The family prefers to preserve what the coffee has always been—small, patient and handmade.
According to the family’s oral memory, coffee may have arrived in this part of São Jorge more than two centuries ago with Azoreans returning from Brazil, bringing both seeds and knowledge. It never became a large commercial plantation crop. Instead, coffee entered domestic life. Alzira remembers that many families once kept two or three plants in their yards for household consumption. When visitors arrived at her grandparents’ home, her grandmother would take out the beans, shell and roast them, and prepare fresh coffee for the guests. In that gesture, coffee was less commodity than hospitality.
But what makes the coffee of Fajã dos Vimes especially intriguing is the landscape that surrounds it. Sea spray carried by the wind reaches the plants, and Alzira says some visitors have even asked whether salt is added to the finished coffee because they detect a subtle saline note. The surrounding fruit trees and flowering incense may also contribute aromas during the period when the coffee develops. Beans from the family were once taken to Delta for analysis and tasting, where, according to Alzira, several aromatic characteristics were identified. Here, terroir is almost literal: the coffee grows breathing the same air as the ocean, flowers and orchards around it.
That intimacy with nature also brings vulnerability. Strong northerly winds and saltwater spray can damage plants and beans, and Alzira describes 2026 as a weak production year. The family now has enough coffee only to serve at its own establishment, by the cup. Although people regularly ask to purchase it outside São Jorge, production is too limited for an export-oriented business. A reserve is normally maintained from one year to the next precisely because harvests can vary so considerably.
The cultivation itself remains remarkably simple. The family says it uses no chemical treatments and has not experienced significant pest problems requiring spraying. Weeds are removed manually, and much of the work continues to be done within the family. Their son now helps maintain the land and harvest the coffee, just as the next generation remains connected to what their parents created even while pursuing its own professional and academic lives.
Perhaps that continuity is the most important harvest of all. Visitors may come to Fajã dos Vimes astonished that coffee can grow in the Azores, but for the Nunes family it belongs to a much older geography of memory: grandparents roasting beans for unexpected guests, emigrants returning from Brazil with seeds, children helping their parents with the harvest, and more than 1,500 plants descending toward an Atlantic that gives the coffee both its protection and its salt.
Some coffees carry the name of a country or a region. At Fajã dos Vimes, every cup seems to carry something smaller and more intimate: a family, a fajã, and nearly two centuries of an island refusing to let an old taste disappear.
Based on a story by journalist Vasco Blayer for Diário dos Açores, Paulo Viveiros-director. The photos are from DI.