Pluma Hidalgo

Pluma Hidalgo is a small coffee town in the Sierra Madre del Sur, about 1,300 m up and roughly 26 km of mountain road above Santa María Huatulco. It is the seat of a municipality of the same name, and on clear days the Pacific is visible from the ridges around it. The town takes its name from the Cerro de la Pluma, the hill where the first settlers camped, and from Miguel Hidalgo, the priest who launched Mexico's war of independence.

Coffee is the reason the town exists. In the 19th century growers from the Miahuatlán district came looking for land for coffee, and after a failed first attempt they settled on the Cerro de la Pluma, at a spot they called La Providencia. Led by the Mijangos brothers, they planted what is remembered as the first large coffee plantation in Oaxaca, and a state decree of 1 December 1880 formally created the town. The local Typica Arabica bean, sold as café Pluma, is grown in cloud forest between about 1,200 and 1,300 m and received a Mexican denomination of origin in 2020.

Today the town is a stop on the Ruta del Café Pluma through the Sierra Sur. Around a dozen fincas take visitors: La Providencia, the oldest, still uses antique machinery for wet processing and has a chapel from 1958; Don Gabriel has a coffee museum, zip line and cabins; Tres Cruces and La Cabaña have waterfalls, one of them about 70 m high. In town there is a market opposite the municipal palace selling coffee and bamboo crafts, and cafés on the main square serve local coffee and chocolate. Nights are cool, the hills are often wrapped in fog, and the Cerro de la Bandera offers a lookout toward the ocean.