Uíge Coffee Plantations

Uíge is known as the coffee province. In the 50s the region went through a real coffee boom, and the city, then called Carmona, became one of the centres of coffee production and trade in Angola. Coffee money paid for the city's airport, hospital and technical school.

Today Uíge coffee is mostly robusta, grown by more than nine thousand smallholders and a few larger farms. According to the Instituto Nacional do Café (National Coffee Institute), the province produces close to half of the country's output. Uíge, Negage, Quitexe, Mucaba, Bungo, Buengas and Quimbele are the municipalities that produce the most.

Visiting a farm lets you see coffee up close: the coffee trees, the harvest, the drying of the beans and the hulling. There are stories to hear, such as that of Fazenda Canjongo, on the outskirts of the city, which Joaquim Dias revived in 1975 after finding it abandoned, or that of Fazenda Boa Entrada, 16 km from the city, with 120 hectares of coffee trees.

The farms are not ticketed attractions. You arrange a visit with the owner or through someone who knows the area, and it is a good way to understand why coffee left such a mark on the history of northern Angola.