In 2024, I bought a cacao farm in the volcanic lowlands at the base of Tenorio Volcano in Costa Rica: a wide, green valley called Llano Azul, where the air smells of damp earth and the river mist sits low until noon.
Most people who land in Liberia, at Costa Rica’s Daniel Oduber International Airport, have their itinerary sorted before the wheels touch down. They’ll spend a few days in Tamarindo, maybe rent a car and head to the Nicoya Peninsula for the beaches, tick off a zip-line and a sunset surf lesson, and go home with a tan and a few bottles of Salsa Lizano. It is a beautiful trip.
I know this country well enough to know there is a different trip inside that same country that’s quieter, older, stranger. And you reach it by driving north.
(Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
A Detour That Became a Decision
I first came to Costa Rica in 2010, running a business with three locations and more than 600 employees across the country. I was not a tourist. My time was spent in meetings, in warehouses, in the middle of operational problems that needed solving. What I did not expect was how differently that work felt here compared to every other place I had built a team. Costa Ricans showed up differently – to their work, to each other, to strangers who needed help. That observation stayed with me long after the business moved on.
Over the following years, a separate thread of curiosity was quietly developing. I had studied environmental science and history in college, and at some point cacao became the subject I kept returning to. I read widely: the science of fermentation and flavor development, the history of cacao’s movement from Mesoamerica through the Spanish trade routes, the largely untold story of the Jewish merchants who built much of the early European chocolate industry, and practical guides like Making Chocolate by the team at Dandelion Chocolate. That reading stretched across roughly a decade. Then I spent two years attending international chocolate conferences and building relationships with some of the best chocolate makers and cacao scientists in the world.
A cup of pure, rich chocolate (Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
The Search for a Cacao Farm
By the time I came back to Costa Rica in 2023, I was not visiting. I was looking.
When I first walked my cacao farm in 2024, I noticed two things immediately. The first was the biodiversity – the density and variety of what was growing was unlike any agricultural land I had seen. The second was the cacao trees themselves: unmanaged, overgrown in places, some of them struggling. But alive. The bones of something extraordinary were there.
We counted roughly 7,500 cacao trees, a small rancho, a lagoon, and more questions than I could answer in a single afternoon.
There was one more thing I already knew about the cacao farm before I signed anything. And it was the reason I did not walk away when the purchase became complicated.
(Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
What the Ground Remembered
During land preparation on the property in 2019 – years before I arrived – ceramic fragments and a small pottery figurine of a frog were found in the soil. The right thing was done: the National Museum of Costa Rica was contacted, and a formal archaeological inspection was conducted on October 24, 2019.
What the archaeologists confirmed changed everything about how I understood this land.
The site was registered as a new archaeological monument under the name Caju – the word for cacao in the language of the Maleku people, the indigenous community who have lived in this region of northern Costa Rica for centuries. Registry code: A-549 Ca. National Museum case: Arqueologia 2019-075. The ceramic material is associated with the Ron Ron archaeological phase, dated to approximately 300 BC through 300 AD. People were living on and working this land more than 2,300 years ago. The nearest previously known archaeological site was 4.6 kilometers away.
Before I bought the farm, I knew this site existed. I also knew that completing the purchase properly required additional archaeological surveys, additional cost, and significantly more time. My background in environmental science and history made it impossible to consider any other approach. The Ron Ron site had already been disturbed by decades of pineapple farming before my involvement – conventional tillage, season after season, that had moved ceramic shards through the soil and made their exact original positions impossible to reconstruct. We find pottery shards consistently across the property. What is left deserves protection, not further disturbance.
(Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
The Cacao Farm: Dedicated Stewardship
Under Costa Rica’s Ley sobre Patrimonio Nacional Arqueologico No. 6703, the cacao farm is now legally designated as the responsible steward of this monument. Any future construction requires a prior assessment by a certified archaeologist. The cacao trees planted at Llano Azul will not require deep earthworks for 20 to 25 years. The farm’s organic practices – no heavy machinery, no synthetic chemicals, no tilling – mean the site is more protected under cacao than under almost any other agricultural use.
I think about the word Caju often. Cacao. The people who walked this land 2,300 years ago left traces in the exact soil where we now grow cacao trees. The name the Maleku gave the fruit that sustained their culture is the same word the archaeologists used to name the monument we are now responsible for protecting.
That kind of continuity is not something you manufacture for a tourism brochure. It is just what happened.
Some of the staff at Blue Valley Chocolate (Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
The People the Tourists Miss: The Malaku
There are approximately 500 Maleku people alive today, living in three small villages near the town of Guatuso – a short drive from the farm. Their territory was devastated by the rubber wars of the late 1800s, when outsiders swept through the region abducting Maleku people as labor. Their numbers fell drastically. The community survived, but barely.
The Maleku have had a long relationship with cacao that predates any commercial interest in the plant. They made a ceremonial drink from it called kahuulii, used the fat from cacao seeds on skin and wounds, and incorporated the tree into spiritual practice. Cacao was not a product to them – it was a plant they lived alongside.
When we named our single-estate chocolate line Maleku Chocolate, we did so with full awareness of that history and with ongoing respect for the community. The 26 cacao hybrid varieties we cultivate at Llano Azul – identified through years of observation and selection by our farm team, found nowhere else on earth – are each registered under the names Maleku 1 through Maleku 26. It is a form of acknowledgment and a standing reminder of who was here first.
Most visitors to Costa Rica’s Guanacaste region never hear the word Maleku. They are one of the country’s least-discussed indigenous communities. But their culture – their language, their relationship with the forest, their cacao traditions – is the deepest layer of context this land has to offer.
What a Cacao Farm Actually Looks, Smells, and Sounds Like
When we run the Half-Day Farm Tour at Finca Blue Valley, we begin at the edge of the orchard just after breakfast, when the light through the rainforest canopy is still soft and the birds are at peak noise. The cacao trees grow in the shade of taller forest species – this is agroforestry, not monoculture – and the understory is dense, humid, and fragrant.
Cacao trees are one of the stranger-looking plants in agriculture. The pods grow directly from the trunk and main branches, not from the tips. They turn yellow, orange, or deep burgundy depending on variety and ripeness. Open a ripe one with a machete and what you find inside looks nothing like chocolate: white pulp wrapped around fat purple-grey seeds, smelling of citrus and fermented fruit. Guests are always surprised. They expected brown and they got tropical.
(Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
Blue Valley Chocolate Tours
The tour walks through each stage of the cacao: the older trees in the section we call El Naranjo (named for the citrus planted alongside), the river corridor where the soil stays cool and rich, the younger planting blocks established after Hurricane Otto passed directly over Llano Azul in November 2016 and knocked down roughly fifty trees. We go through the fermentation boxes – the six-day process where naturally occurring bacteria and yeasts convert the sugars in the cacao pulp into the acid compounds that will eventually become flavor in the finished bar. Fermentation is the single most important variable in chocolate quality, and almost nobody outside the industry knows it exists. We end under the rancho for a traditional vegetarian farm lunch.
At some point during the walk, if the morning is quiet enough, someone spots the alligator in the lagoon or the sloths in the guarumo trees.
There is no zip line and there is no gift shop at the entrance. There are no other tourists. The tour requires advance notice – not because we are being exclusive, but because the farm manager is actually managing a farm and needs reasonable warning.
That, I would argue, is the point. The experience is real because the place is real.
(Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
Guanacaste: What the Crowds Miss
Playa Brasilito, where our chocolate factory sits inside a small commercial center called The Village, is not unknown. It is a beach town in a region that receives significant tourism. But even here, the experience gap between what most visitors do and what is actually available is large.
People stop at the Pacific beaches, which are spectacular and deserve their reputation. Fewer take the time to sit with a guided tasting that walks from raw cacao bean to finished bar, eating what they have just learned to identify. Fewer still book the factory’s hands-on bean-to-bar class and leave with a bar they made themselves.
Blue Valley Chocolate runs those chocolate experiences out of the Brasilito location: the Discovering Chocolate guided tasting ($55), the full Bean-to-Bar class ($80), and tasting boards that move through cacao in every form – fresh juice, raw nibs, caramelized cacao, shell tea, and finished bars side by side. The space is small. The team knows the material down to the genetics of each cacao variety.
Maleku Chocolate has earned nine international awards across the International Chocolate Awards and Costa Rica’s Feria de Chocolate – three of them Gold, including the 70% dark bar and the 60% milk with chili. But the more interesting credential is the farm itself: 7,500 trees across organic agroforestry land, a legally protected on-site archaeological monument, a functioning rainforest corridor, 99% renewable energy, and 26 cacao varieties that exist nowhere else on earth.
(Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
Like Confetti Travel, Celebrate Travel, Culture, and Connection: In that Order
The phrase “hidden gem” has been applied to so many places that it has become meaningless. What I mean by the road north is something different: the parts of Costa Rica that require you to commit to not knowing exactly what you will find.
The Maleku villages near Guatuso are not set up for tourism. Tenorio Volcano and the turquoise waters of Rio Celeste – a 45-minute drive from the farm – draw visitors, but the valley around Llano Azul remains almost entirely local. You will eat at small sodas where the menu is written in marker on a whiteboard. You’ll navigate roads where Google Maps runs out of confidence, and find that the people you meet – farmers, local guides, the National Museum archaeologists who showed up when the ceramic frog came out of the ground – are uniformly generous in the way that remote Costa Rica tends to produce.
What I found in 2010, running a business and working alongside Costa Ricans every day, was something I didn’t have a name for then: a culture that makes time for people. It is still there. Fifteen years later, it is one of the reasons I bought a farm here instead of somewhere else.
That connection between a traveler who shows up curious, a place that has been accumulating history long before the first tourist arrived, and a culture that deserves to be understood rather than passed through – that is what travel at its best actually delivers.
The beaches are worth it. So is the road to the northern side of Costa Rica.
(Photo courtesy Blue Valley Chocolate)
For More:
- Want to schedule a visit to Costa Rica’s Blue Valley Chocolate? Take a look at their list of cacao workshops!
- Purchase the chocolates locally at their factory store in Brasilito located at Centro Comercial The Village #127, Brasilito, Guanacaste. Or, onleine at: https://bluevalleychocolate.com/collections/chocolates. They deliver within Costa Rica and ship to the US.
- On our site: Salon du Chocolat: Celebrating International Chocolates
- On our site: Charleston’s Cocoa Academic: A Leader in the Bean to Bar Movement
– All photos courtesy of Gideon Rubin and Blue Valley Chocolate.
