Location
Pacoche Wildlife Refuge – Manta – Montecristi
Time
7.5 hours approx.
Timing is adaptable to travelers’ needs (Cruise ship schedules)
Difficulty
Easy
Pricing
From 99 USD per person
6+ guests: $99 p.p.
3–5 guests: $135 p.p.
2 guests (private): $180 p.p.
Best for: food lovers, coffee and chocolate fans, and cruise guests who want one day that shows how Manabí really lives, cooks and makes things.
- Plant-to-cup coffee walk and unlimited tasting at a working farm in the Pacoche forest
- Panoramic stop at the San Lorenzo Lighthouse above the Pacific
- Tonga lunch cooked in banana leaves over a wood-fired oven
- Panama hat weavers in Montecristi and Nacional cacao chocolate at Samor
About this tour
Just 30 minutes from the cruise terminal, the road climbs into the Pacoche forest — a pocket of coastal cloud forest where howler monkeys call from the canopy — and arrives at Finca Agroturística Café de Pacoche, a working coffee farm where you’ll follow the bean from plant to cup over two unhurried hours. Walk the plantation to see how coffee is planted, pruned and harvested; watch the beans go through pulping, fermenting, drying and roasting; then step behind the bar to taste the difference between a blonde, a medium-dark and an Italian roast, brewed in front of you by siphon, Moka pot, French press and Aeropress. Coffee is unlimited, and the tasting is yours to linger over.
From there, a short climb to the San Lorenzo Lighthouse, perched above the cliffs where the forest meets the Pacific — the panoramic stop of the day, and the photo everyone takes home.
Then the part no one else offers. Deep in the Pacoche refuge, lunch is Tonga — the dish that defines Manabí — slow-cooked in banana leaves over a traditional horno de leña (wood-fired oven). Your guide walks you through what makes Manabí cuisine its own culinary world: the peanut, the green plantain, the smoke, the patience. It’s not a lunch stop bolted onto a tour. It’s the reason coastal Ecuador cooks the way it does, explained where it’s actually made. (Vegetarian option available.)
The afternoon turns to craft in Montecristi, where master weavers work toquilla straw into the hats the world mistakenly calls Panama hats — a UNESCO-recognized tradition you’ll watch up close, with the chance to take home one made to fit you.
The day closes at Samor, a small-batch chocolate maker in Manta, with a tasting, a traditional chocolate drink, and the story of Ecuador’s rare Nacional cacao — a genotype traced back more than 5,000 years, and the reason this coast is on the map of the world’s finest chocolate.
