Domingo Torres & his family

Domingo Torres Angulo was born in Guapi, on Colombia's Pacific coast, in 1963, the youngest of twenty-five children. School gave him just enough to sign his name and read; the sea gave him a living. He became a fisherman.

On the 12th of December 1979, that living almost became his death. He was sixteen, out on the water with his uncle, when a three-metre wave rose out of nowhere and swallowed their boat. Stripped by the surf and certain they were finished, they swam until, somehow, they reached the shore. Behind them, one of the most violent earthquakes and tsunamis of the century tore through the coast. Domingo lived. It was the first of his many lives.

At seventeen he left Guapi for the sugarcane fields of Valle del Cauca, then crossed into Venezuela, where he ended up undocumented, jailed, and finally deported. He came home in 1987 and scraped by in Cúcuta selling clothes and produce before going down into the mines. Eleven years underground.

With everything he and Saray had saved, he bought a rocky plot called Finca El Roble, high above Ragonvalia. He knew nothing about farming, and cattle failed him first. When he was ready to give up, it was Saray who kept him going, every single day: “Vamos pa'lante, Domingo. Vamos pa'lante.” Onward.

So he tried coffee. He hauled away hundreds of stones by hand and planted ten thousand Castillo trees while neighbours called him crazy. Then he planted something no one believed in: Geisha, at 1,920 metres, where the mountain air keeps the leaf rust away. The first lab result said it all. The cherries were early, but the coffee was exceptional.

In 2021 he entered Colombia's national quality competition and won first place. He won again in 2022, and by 2023 a single lot of his coffee sold at auction for a record $120.50 a pound. The man they called crazy had turned a hillside of stones into the most awarded coffee in the country, and turned Ragonvalia into coffee country after all.