Aljidan

Aljidan · Community Lot · Natural · Yemenia · Aljidan, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

The entire village of Aljidan amounts to a little over seven thousand coffee trees. Around fifty families farm them at 2,200 metres, on plots that are startling in their smallness, some of them no bigger than a room. Coffee has grown here for more than four hundred years, and winters are cold enough to bite.

Many of those trees are over a century old. The older farmers will tell you some are past a hundred and fifty, planted by people whose names are still known in the village, and the skill needed to keep them productive has come down the same way the trees have.

For most of that history the coffee left without a trace. Farmers sold to traders who came through, and that was the end of it: no knowledge of which country it went to, who roasted it, or what it eventually sold for. Now it goes out under the name of the village and they can follow where it lands. Selling ripe cherry rather than drying and hauling it has also taken a considerable amount of work off the household.

Water sets the ceiling. The rain arrives in a rush and most of it leaves again, because the village cannot afford to build the barriers that would hold it.

Aljidan lots have been in the Best of Yemen since 2021, and the farmer who won the whole auction last year works these same terraces.