From mid-September to late October, French coffee connoisseurs learned about how coffee shapes the lives of residents of Costa Rica through a special photographic exhibit. At La Caféothèque de Paris, located near the Pont-Marie, Saint-Paul metro station, coffee is extremely serious business, and it was here where the work of seven Tico photographers who focus on coffee-related subjects recently took center place.

France is known as a nation where culture is treated with utmost reverence, and La Caféothèque de Paris is certainly no exception to this rule. La Caféothèque de Paris is not just a coffee shop where roasts from different parts of the world are served; this is one of Europe’s most important cultural centers dedicated to the caffeinated arts. Two roasts from Costa Rica are served at La Caféothèque: Finca Herbazú from the Western Valley and Finca Don Mayo from Tarrazú. If you ask for any of these two Tico coffees at La Caféothèque, the barista will likely switch from French to Spanish before breaking out the chorreador (traditional coffee sieve used in Costa Rica) and engaging you in conversation about crop conditions in San Gerardo de Dota.

It was at La Caféothèque where CafeTico took place. This was a special exhibit (PDF)  featuring the works of the following Costa Rican photographers:

• William Cordero
• Ana Kristina Pérez
• Cristopher Alpízar
• Daniela Castro
• Mario Fonseca
• Leornado Jiménez
• Sofía Ortiz

The exhibition was enthusiastically received by the coffee cognoscenti in Paris, who are always eager to learn more about how coffee affects the lives of people around the world. This exhibit was organized by the Association of Costa Ricans in France and Dos Mares, a cultural effort to bring Central America closer to France.

Costa Rica once enjoyed strong cultural bonds with France when the lovely French language was the foreign lingua franca taught at the secondary educational level. The English language would eventually relegate French, but efforts to return to Francophile mode have been recently attempted.