Monte Café

Monte Café

Monte Café, which means "coffee mountain" in Portuguese, is a village on the island of São Tomé and Príncipe. The village, which lies at an altitude of 670 meters in mountainous terrain ideal for coffee growing, is home to one of São Tomé's oldest plantations, which was founded in 1858. The village is located near tourist attractions such as the Bom Sucesso Botanical Garden, Lagoa Amélia and São Nicolau Waterfall, which is spectacular in the rainy season, one of the island's main tourist attractions. The Bom Sucesso Botanical Garden is the main botanical garden of São Tomé & Príncipe. Equipped with numerous facilities, it is a major tourist attraction and the starting point for most mountain walks on the island. Like the national herbarium, the botanical garden is part of the ECOFAC project, a program founded by the European Union. The collection and identification of the archipelago's plant species began in 1994, but became more systematic in the 2000s, notably with the creation of the Obô Nature Park in 2006, and then through various partnerships with the French Global Environment Facility, the Monte Pico Association and the University of Coimbra. In 2007, the Botanic Garden's list of cultivated plants included 574 species, while the herbarium contained 2383 species. The garden is home to several endemic species, as well as orchids.