Frenchwoman Fleur Leparquier lives in Estellencs. She is an agricultural engineer and has also established the business Madre Sierra Products, which specialises in Mexican coffee that she sells from her shop in Banyalbufar, at the market in Paguera, and to gourmet restaurants.
Her association with Mexican coffee came about when she went to La Cuesta, a small town in the state of Jalisco, in order to study the forest resources and the old system of cultivating coffee, something which had largely disappeared in favour of livestock breeding. In La Cuesta, financial aid had allowed the maintenance of coffee cultivation on some 900 hectares of land.
While she was there, a meeting was held of the board of the Cooperativa Montaña Azul - Blue Mountain Cooperative. She got to know Delia Hernández Gómez, who invited her to stay at her home, as well as coffee growers. She was there for some four months. The following year, the French Natural History Museum and the Centre for Central American Studies in Mexico invited her to return to La Cuesta. This was in order to take part in workshops for coffee agro-ecology and in activities such as harvesting coffee.
Delia was at that time starting a micro-business for coffee, marketing to tourist shops in the area. Through this, people were introduced to the work that Fleur was doing.
Between 2017 and 2018, she spent a few more months in La Cuesta, and this convinced her that she should establish a coffee business in Majorca, and so Madre Sierra Products was born. In order to do this, she had to arrange all the logistics of transporting the coffee, which wasn't easy as there was no specific export route from La Cuesta. Agricultural engineering friends helped her with the legal documentation that verifies the origin of the coffee.
At her place in Banyalbufar, she does the coffee roasting herself, having been trained in the subtleties of using a coffee roaster.