My Guatemala Notebookcuaderno · Antigua Guatemala

Order one of the dos-de-tres menus. They do a proper typical Guatemalan breakfast too, and the coffee keeps coming as long as you are sitting there.

The kind of place you end up in twice in a day without meaning to: breakfast, then back for lunch. The coffee holds up on its own, the plates come with good ripe fruit on the side, and nobody minds you sitting with a laptop between the two.

They take the coffee seriously — Guatemala grows some of the best in the world and this is one of the places you can actually taste that. Quiet enough to open a laptop and stay a while, and there are two proper work desks set up for exactly that — worth taking one if it is free.

The other one on the working rotation. Good coffee, and a big room at the back with far more space than the front lets on — walk through rather than taking the first table you see. Nobody hovers when your cup has been empty for an hour.

I love their açaí bowl — that is the reason I keep going back. There is a big shared cowork table too, so it is an easy one to bring a laptop to and stay a while.

Somewhere to go and do something rather than just sit: the shelves are full of board games and you play them over a drink. The indoor afternoon when the rain comes in, or when nobody wants to walk anywhere.

We had great lunches here, more than once. It is the one we kept going back to at midday rather than hunting for somewhere new.

The tacos were excellent both times we have been. Go up rather than sitting inside — the roof terrace is a lovely place to eat.

We end up here often, and it is almost always tacos — they are very good. Nothing fussy about the place, which is half the appeal.

Mediterranean and Italian specialities, and good memories of it: one loaded plate of finger food between us, out on the patio, and an evening that went longer than planned.

Full every night, which tells you most of it — book a table and you are set. Lovely meals, and a proper change of gear from a week of Guatemalan kitchens.

The room is as much of the reason as the food: a garden you sit out in, packed with art and old objects, with chess boards set up around it — we have never played one, we just come to eat. The sushi is good and the garden is a lovely place to sit.

The traditional dishes cooked the way they are meant to be, in a nice room with white tablecloths. Worth booking for a night out. Order the shuco if you want the proper Guatemalan dirty meal — they do a very good sit-down version of it.

Our lunch recommendation: the chicken is the whole point, baked above a wood fire, and you can smell it before you find the door. The room has a proper Guatemalan feel that most places in town have polished off, and it is worth going for that alone.

• Cash only.
• It can be packed or half empty depending entirely on when you turn up — go off the obvious hours.

Go up rather than staying at street level. The roof is the reason: their own beer, live music most nights, and the volcanoes lined up over the rooftops while the light goes.

The name says beer and undersells the place. It is enormous, and planted like a garden rather than laid out like a bar: flowers and greenery everywhere, decorations strung through the trees, a band on most nights, food trucks round the edge, board games on the shelf and a small playground for kids. The beer is local craft rather than the usual lager. You do not have to drink beer — or drink at all — to have a good night here, which is why it is the easiest place to take a group that cannot agree on anything. It is just as nice in the daytime: the garden is lovely in the sun, and the kids have room to run around.

Fried chicken, and the chain Guatemalans are genuinely proud of — better seasoned and better fried than the American ones it is compared to. Worth going once precisely because it is not a secret local gem: this is what the whole country eats, and there is a branch on the Calle del Arco.

Half garden centre, half restaurant, and better for being both. You sit surrounded by plants with a pond alongside, the menu leans hard on health food with proper vegan options rather than one token dish, and on the way out you can buy any of what you have been sitting among. The obvious place to take a plant person, and a very calm hour either way.

Worth the short trip out: proper Guatemalan cooking rather than a tourist menu, coffee that was grown on the land you are sitting on, and a tour of the plantation if you want to see where it came from before you drink it. Makes a half day out of what would otherwise be lunch.

Free to walk into, and the reason to go back is the workshop — you roast, grind and temper your own bar and take it away. Guatemala grew cacao long before anyone here had heard of Spain, and this is the easiest place to be shown that rather than told it. They also do chocobananos and the rest of the chocolate-dipped fruit — banana, pineapple, strawberry — if you just want something for the walk.

Where we did the coffee tour: the plantation, the drying patios and the Museo del Café on one site, so you follow the bean from the tree to the cup in an hour. Close enough to Antigua to be a morning rather than a day out.

The reason to pick this one over any other: half of it sits outside on a patio under a tent, so you train in the open air and daylight rather than under strip lights, with cover when it rains. The other half is indoors as usual, so you get both. Changes the whole feel of an ordinary hour in a gym.

A Protestant church with good music and a welcoming vibe. Services run in both English and Spanish — English on Sunday at 9, Spanish at 10:30 and 11:45. Plenty of travellers passing through join. Come a little earlier — there is coffee, and people to talk to before it starts.

Nothing here is arranged for visitors, which is exactly why it is worth an hour. Produce, butchers, hardware, comedores, and the whole valley doing its shopping at once. Loud, tight and completely unlike the postcard streets four blocks east.

Where we go to sit and watch the town go about its evening: families out, shoeshiners working the benches, someone selling something, the fountain going. Do a slow lap and then take a bench — that is the whole activity, and it is a good one. On Saturdays and around the feast days there are market stalls out across it as well.

Come at dusk. The square in front of the yellow church fills with carts and stalls: tostadas, tacos, atol and arroz con chocolate out of the pot, grilled things, sweets for the children. It is where the town eats standing up, and the cheapest good evening you can have here — take small notes and a strong stomach.

It is a full supermarket, just not the kind you know: narrow aisles crammed floor to ceiling, everything stacked rather than merchandised, and always Guatemalan music playing over it. This is where the town does its actual shopping — cheap, well stocked, and a grocery run you do not mind doing.

Ask for the tour: it is free, and it is the part worth coming for. You see the raw stone, the cutting and polishing, and why the Maya valued jade above gold — which makes the shop at the end make a lot more sense whether or not you buy anything.

Small, crammed and right in the middle of everything — textiles, souvenirs and the rest, all within a few steps of each other. The easy option when you want to buy something without the walk out to the Mercado Central or the crush once you get there.

Small enough to see all of it in ten minutes, and more artistic than the stalls — this is the one to go into if you want cloth chosen by someone with taste rather than cloth by the metre.

Go to experience modern Guatemala. Nothing about it is colonial or picturesque, and that is the point — this is where the country actually shops, eats and spends a Saturday afternoon in 2026, an hour from a town that stopped in 1773. Packed with luxury shops, and there is a childrens playground and a cinema in it, so it holds a whole afternoon rather than an errand.

Same window on modern Guatemala as Oakland Mall, with one thing Oakland has not got: the Museo Miraflores sits alongside it, on the edge of the Kaminaljuyú mounds. Two thousand years of city and a food court, in one stop.

Rows of lavender and a lot else in flower, laid out to walk through slowly. An hour of quiet colour, and about as far from a volcano hike as the valley gets.

Unashamedly a theme park and none the worse for it — turf-roofed houses, a hand-carved throne on the edge of the drop, and swings out over the valley. Built with kids in mind, but you do not need any: I went with my parents and the three of us had a great time on it. The ride up is part of it as well — you go the last stretch standing in the back of a truck, up the hill and through the villages. The views are real regardless.

• It gets properly cold up there once the sun drops — take a jacket if you are staying into the evening.

The big one. You camp near the summit at around 3,900 m and watch Fuego erupt through the night from across the saddle. Genuinely hard walking and genuinely cold at the top — but the standout experience in the region.

• Book with an operator that provides proper cold-weather gear.
• Altitude is the real difficulty, not distance. Spend a couple of days in Antigua first.

Far easier than Acatenango and doable as a half-day trip. You walk out over old lava fields with steam still rising off them, close enough to a live volcano to feel it. I have been twice, once with my parents — both over sixty and not hikers at all, just active in an everyday way, and that was enough. The van ride out is half the trip: you go through the local villages rather than round them, so stay awake for it.

• It can be very windy at the top — take a windproof layer even if you left Antigua in shirtsleeves.

A private reserve on the hillside south-east of the city. You walk up through the trees, the feeders partway up bring the hummingbirds in close, and there are swimming pools if you want to cool off at the end of it.

Genuinely huge, and built around Maya motifs rather than the usual plastic. Two and a half hours each way from Antigua, so it only makes sense if you are already heading down that way.