A cup of coffee can tell the story of a place
Updated: Oct 14
A cup of coffee is familiar. The lives, culture, and landscape behind it are often less visible.
Who grew it? What else grows alongside it? What knowledge, resources, and work brought it to the table? For a traveler, those questions can open a deeper relationship with a destination.
For many years, I’ve worked in hospitality and destination storytelling, asking what makes a journey stay with us after we return home. Again and again, I come back to the people and everyday rituals that give a place its character.
My perspective draws on more than twenty years across destination marketing, hospitality, public relations, and creative production. As Director of New Projects and Marketing at the Puerto Vallarta Convention and Visitors Bureau, and through my work with hotels, I learned to connect a destination’s stories, partnerships, and visitor experiences. Today, I bring that experience to projects rooted in local culture, food, nature, and community.
The permaculture retreat in Cuetzalan with Larry Santoyo, produced by Suddha Prem and operated by Be a Conscious Traveler, brought those connections to life for me. Created in collaboration with Larry and hosted at Tosepan Kali, the journey connected travelers with ecological learning, local culture, and the landscape of Puebla’s cloud forests. My work in developing and producing the experience brought together the setting, learning opportunities, and practical details that allowed guests to participate.
It also invited me to look more closely at the relationships between food, land, community, and the resources that sustain a place. Understanding those connections helped clarify my own purpose: to create experiences that nurture our relationship with one another and with the living world.
That experience helped shape my Soulful Coffee Retreat concept, shared in this Cuetzalan publication. I wanted to begin with something familiar—a cup of coffee—and invite travelers to follow its story beyond the table, into the culture and landscape that give it meaning.
In the mountains of Puebla, Tosepan Kali offers a setting for that encounter. Its hospitality is connected to the wider Tosepan cooperative movement and the Nahua and Totonac communities whose work sustains it. Visitors have an opportunity to learn about the relationships among local livelihoods, cultural knowledge, and care for the land, with community members leading the telling of their own stories.
Co-producing and co-directing the COVOLV documentaries about Cuetzalan and Tosepan Titataniske with Ryan Yoshimoto gave me another way to explore those relationships. Through documentary storytelling, I came to better understand what people can build through cooperation, local knowledge, ancestral wisdom, and sustained collective effort.
Through the retreat, travelers could participate and learn firsthand. Through the films, those stories could reach audiences beyond the destination. Both deepened my interest in how hospitality and communication can help people understand the places they encounter.
This is why I paid attention to the TUI Care Foundation’s announcement of Field to Fork Austria on October 7, 2026. The program aims to connect farmers, food producers, hotels, and restaurants through regional sourcing and experiences such as farm visits, tastings, and cooking workshops.
Its results still lie ahead. But the approach raises a question close to my work: how can travel strengthen the relationships that sustain a place while protecting its ecosystems and respecting its cultural integrity?
Cuetzalan deepened my appreciation for consuming locally and recognizing what already works before introducing something new. My permaculture training reinforced the importance of observation: understanding how energy and resources move through a system, valuing diversity, and working with the relationships already present.
Those principles influence how I approach experience design. Before developing a program, I want to understand who lives and works in a place, what they want to share, and what participation could mean for them. A visitor experience begins well before an itinerary is written.
For hotels and retreats, that care takes practical form in whom we partner with, what we purchase, how we compensate local contributors, and whose voices guide the experience. Local participation should offer a clear benefit to the people contributing their time, knowledge, and work. Their stories deserve context, consent, and accurate credit.
The same curiosity shapes the experiences I create for families and children in Los Angeles. Through cooking, art, and shared activities, we explore where ingredients come from, learn about cultural traditions with respect, and practice simple ways of caring for our surroundings.
A child asking where an ingredient grows is beginning to see a larger system. Recognizing that we are nature—that our lives depend on soil, water, plants, animals, and one another—can nurture a sense of belonging and responsibility. A recipe becomes an introduction to geography, seasons, family traditions, and the work of people they may never meet.
That connection also runs through my books. In My Mama’s Healing Soups, I bring together food, memory, and the care we share through cooking. In Tiny Chefs Around the World, I invite children to discover different cultures through recipes. Writing gives me another way to explore where we come from, how we nourish one another, and what we can learn around a table.
As someone born in Mexico who has made California home, I’m drawn to the connections food and shared experiences can create across cultures. California’s growers, regional kitchens, creative communities, and varied landscapes offer many opportunities for this kind of storytelling.
The lesson I carry from Cuetzalan is to begin by listening to each place on its own terms. What makes it distinctive? Who carries its knowledge? How can visitors participate respectfully? And how can the experience support the people who make it possible?
These questions guide the work I want to develop with destinations, hotels, and community partners: stories and experiences that help visitors understand more, connect more thoughtfully, and recognize the value of what a place already holds.
A delicious cup of coffee is a beginning. Understanding the lives and landscape behind it is the journey I want to help create.
— Gabriela Rocha Caballero
Gabriela Rocha Caballero is an author, creative director, and experience designer, and the founder of Be a Conscious Traveler and Suddha Prem. She is also a co-producer and co-director of COVOLV. Her work connects destination storytelling, hospitality, culture, food, nature, and education.
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