There are several theories addressing the arrival of coffee to the continent, one of them being that the first beans arrived to the port of Santa Marta. Because coffee only grows at high altitudes, it would have first been planted here a little further up from Minca. The Spaniards that planted it were never really able to exploit the opportunity, and ended up abandoning the plants, leaving them to grown wildly until the 1880s when two foreign couples saw the opportunity and invested. When Colombian families began moving to the area in the early 1900s, they became the major employers of the region. The coffee was almost completely wiped out by the commercial arrival of marijuana, which completely took over the economy. The cultural and commercial center of the region changed from the coffee farms to the community of Minca.Â
