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Hacienda Buena Vista, also known as Hacienda Vives, is an early 19th century plantation and estate in the foothills of the central cordillera of Puerto Rico, north of Ponce. Don Salvador de Vives started this estate in 1833. It is now owned by the Puerto Rico Conservation Trust (Fideicomiso de Conservación). Today it functions as a museum. In English the name Hacienda Buena Vista means "beautiful view estate."
[edit] History
Hacienda Buena Vista was started in 1833 by Don Salvador de Vives, a Catalonian emigrant and three-time mayor of Ponce, as a truck farm to produce plantains, bananas, corn (maize), avocados and other fruits for sale in Ponce and in the sugarcane estates along the southern coast. Originally, the Vives estate covered 500 acres (2 km²). In 1845, the son of Don Salvador family added a cornmeal corn mill operation to the profitable fruit and vegetable production. The grandson of Don Salvador oversaw the addition of coffee growing and processing to the plantains and cornmeal, taking advantage of the great coffee growing boom of the 1880s and 1890s. Eventually Hacienda Buena Vista would become one of the more successful plantations in mountains of Puerto Rico. By 1937 agriculture had seriously declined in Puerto Rico, and this coffee plantation was partially abandoned, becoming mostly a weekend country house for the Vives. Worker barracks, outbuildings and equipment deteriorated rapidly from the tropical climate and rainfall.
In 1984, the Puerto Rico Conservation Trust bought 86 of the original 500 acres (2.0 km²), with the intention of restoring it. Despite the grave deterioration of the coffee-processing machinery and the farm buildings, the Conservation Trust managed to restore the estate so that it could be used to educate the public about the golden era of fine coffee growing in the mountains of Puerto Rico.
Hacienda Buena Vista is now a well known educational tourist destination. Visitors (with prior reservations) can take interesting tours through the old Vives country home and explore the plantation buildings and grounds. Original 19th-century farm machinery is exhibited that shows how a coffee plantation worked in the 1880s.
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