Great insight into the coffee growing industry. Highly recommend. - Wonderful trip to this small coffee plantation with the original colonial house. Our guide , Monica, was really knowledgeable about the history of the country, slavery and plantations. We all really enjoyed meeting Marcelo and his wife and learning about the coffee growing and harvesting process.

Much knowledge about coffee and the history of Brazil - The excursion is spectacular. You learn a lot, both about coffee and the history of the Hacienda and Brazil. I highly recommend doing this excursion because of everything you learn and because of how different it is from other river excursions.

Visit to the coffee farm - Visiting a coffee farm is a wonderful cultural experience that touches our senses and imagination. It's as if we were in a historical soap opera with coffee barons, slaves, social life in the 19th century... Fazenda da Taquara is unique, as we are welcomed and guided by the owner Marcelo, sixth generation of the same family, who tells us the history of the place with great pride. His wife Cleide is lovely and presented us with a delicious homemade corn and guava cake (my youngest daughter devoured half of it! I beg your pardon!🤣). The coffee is special and premium. Everything done with lots of love and dedication. This place deserves to be known and publicized. I brought coffee with me, but when I finish it, my memories of this charming farm will remain. I also cannot fail to thank the guide Mónica Bertazzolo who was tireless in telling us the history of coffee in Brazil and the slaves who worked on the farms. He has great knowledge about the odyssey of slaves. He is a wonderful person who I recommend asking for this and other cultural tours in Rio. I am very grateful for having chosen this tour. It filled my soul and was the best of many I've done.

Great tour, great coffee farm - 100% a great tour and a great day for us: Monica - the tour guide - excellent knowledge about Rio / Brazil history - very good English and a very nice person Gregorio - the driver - very safe driving, funny, good English as well Car, pick-up, drop-of, communication from tour agency - all perfect The farm was very nice, a lot of history. The owners, Marcelo and his wife are trying to conserve it and also to produce a high quality coffee. We made a tour around the farm, we visited the historic house, we had a cake, nice coffee and some very nice conversations. All the best from Anca and Mihai from Romania.

Best experience in Brazil – feel invited to a historic home - Amazing family sharing remarkable history and hospitality with their guests. A unique farm that has been owned by one family for almost two centuries. They keep a lot of original furniture, clothes, tableware, and have renovated a very cozy dining hall for events and gatherings. A special treat is the gourmet coffee grown at this farm. You will learn all the prep steps and enjoy sweet treats baked by the owner’s wife. Be aware that they only speak Portuguese, so you’ll definitely need a guide who speaks your language. Highly, totally, and undoubtedly recommended!! 11 out of 10 stars :)

I would recommend and pick Monica to guide! - This trip was great. It was fun to get away from the city and out into the rest of the country. The coffee farm and house were very informative and a neat experience. Monica was a superb guide! Fun and very, very knowledgeable. I would highly recommend. And make sure to buy the delicious coffee!

Authentic Coffee farm - a perfect experience for your trip! - The trip to the Coffee farm was amazing. You can see a place with two century family history, you can see amazing green surroundings and very nice hosts that give you the chance to see a completely original way of growing and production of coffee. We were introduced to the whole process, we could have the chance to see the house where a few generations lived. At the end we finished with a very tasty degustation of a freshly drinded coffee and a homemade cake. It's something different from the typical toursist attractions but it's definitely worth it. Last but not least, our tour guide Monica Francesca Bertazzolo was great - so nice, so inteligente and with so rich and wide knowledge of Brasil as a whole. We recommend it with two hands!

Immerse yourself in the history of Brazilian coffee production and trade - Immerse yourself in the history of Brazilian coffee production and trade We visited the Fazenda in August. We wanted to have an experience that would immerse us in a real Brazilian scenario, after a few days of visiting the city of Rio de Janeiro. In the Fazenda da Taquara we found what we were looking for: a coffee plantation and a colonial house that spanned the entire history of coffee production and trade in this Region. The Fazenda has operated for around 300 years and is now managed by the last heir: Marcelo, an exquisite person who puts passion into his project of recovering the family business. Inside the colonial house it was possible to take a tour of the rooms where we saw the clothes of previous generations and the coffee work tools from 1750 to today. This tour is highly recommended for anyone who wants to experience the history of Brazil first hand! Our guide Monica, with a 360 degree culture, introduced us very well to the history of the Fazenda, framing it in the broader historical-social scenario of Brazil and the Rio de Janeiro region, touching on both the positive aspects (architectural-artistic phenomena ) and both negative phenomena (trafficking and slave trade, auctions of people, etc.).

Historical coffee tour - Monica was a fantastic guide. She communicated so much history in an engaging fashion. We learnt an enormous amount about the history of coffee plantations in Rio state, about Rio city & Brazil more broadly. She also translated information from the farm owner. The tour was at least as much about the family of planters as it was about coffee itself. Seeing some of the paraphernalia related to slavery deepened my understanding of the brutality of the system. This tour is not so much about loving coffee, but more about the history. Although, it was lovely to finish the tour with the locally grown coffee & home made cake.

Very Bad experience all around - misinformation, poor use of my time/money - I would NOT recommend this tour. Specifically, I would not recommend this tour to non-Portuguese speakers. We were originally told this was an 8 AM tour. The evening before we were told that we’d get picked up at 11 AM instead of 8 AM for a 3 PM Tour. At the time that we took this tour, there was only one tour time per day. So we had no choice but to accept. Departing from Rio, the Farm was 2.5 hours away, one way! Our Viator tour guide told us that she’d never been assigned to this tour before and therefore she had little to no information about the days events. We met at the pickup point where we waited for other tour-goers. We ended up driving ~5-6 hours in a small 5 passenger vehicle with 5 passengers loaded into it. We were offered 0 bathroom breaks or food breaks from the moment we left Rio until we returned to Rio 7 hours later (except for at the farm). At the farm, the farm owner/guide arrives and informs all of us that he doesn’t speak English (which everyone else on the tour spoke.) He explains to our Viator tour guide that she will have to translate EVERYTHING he says into broken English. Now, imagine never being to a location and not knowing anything about a place… you’re spoken to in Portuguese and somebody else is translating their second language and you still can’t understand what is happening. I give credit to our Viator tour guide for trying, but there were many instances where the Farm owner and guide talked for many minutes straight without a single translation simply because the Viator guide was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to translate properly everything that she was being taught. To cap it all off… there was BY FAR one of the more expensive tours that we went on during our 12 days in Brazil. It felt like we were cheated out of nearly $300 USD for 6 hours in a crammed vehicle, 1 hour tour, and very little new learnings about what was expected.