Seasonal Eating Where the Year Has Two Rainy Seasons

"Eat seasonally" is one of the few pieces of food advice almost nobody argues with. It is also written almost entirely by people living in temperate latitudes, where the year has four acts and a shopping calendar can tell you that March means leeks and August means tomatoes.

Move that advice to seven degrees north of the equator and it stops making sense in the form you learned it. Day length in Huila barely changes across the year. There is no spring, no autumn, no killing frost, no dormancy. The concept of seasonality does not disappear — it changes shape entirely, and the new shape is more interesting than the old one.

Two rainy seasons, not four seasons

Colombia's Andean interior runs on a bimodal rainfall regime. Rather than one wet period and one dry, the year has two of each, driven by the intertropical convergence zone passing overhead twice as it migrates north and south.

Broadly, the wetter stretches fall around March to May and again around September to November, with drier windows in between. Local people rarely say "summer" or "winter" in the European sense; verano means the dry spell and invierno means the rains, regardless of what the calendar says.

For food, rain is the clock. Rain triggers flowering in many tropical trees, and fruit follows flowering by a predictable interval. That is why the harvest calendar of a tropical valley reads as a lagged echo of its rainfall chart, and why a farmer can tell you what will be abundant in three months by remembering what the sky did last month.

The other axis: seasons stacked vertically

Here is the part that has no temperate equivalent. In the Andes, altitude does the work that latitude does elsewhere. Colombians describe this in pisos térmicos — thermal floors — and the vocabulary is genuinely useful.

• Tierra caliente, below about 1,000 metres. Plantain, cassava, mango, papaya, cacao, sugar cane, rice. Rivera, where the Oasis is being built, sits in this band.
• Tierra templada, roughly 1,000 to 2,000 metres. Coffee country, citrus, avocado, lulo, granadilla.
• Tierra fría, roughly 2,000 to 3,000 metres. Potatoes in dozens of varieties, brassicas, tree tomato, blackberries, uchuva.
• Páramo, above that: the high wet moorland, largely not farmed, and the water tower that feeds everything below.

A market in a Huila town therefore aggregates several climates at once. The mangoes came up from the hot valley floor, the blackberries came down from cold country a few hours away, and both are in season today. Vertical distance replaces the waiting that a temperate year imposes.

What this changes about coffee

Coffee shows the pattern beautifully. Colombia is one of the few origins that harvests almost continuously, because different departments flower and ripen at different times. In the southern departments, including Huila, the main harvest falls around the middle of the year, with a secondary crop — the mitaca — later on; further north and in the centre, the main harvest arrives at the end of the year.

The practical consequence is that "fresh crop" means something different depending on which Colombian coffee you are drinking, and that harvest is not a single national event but a wave moving across the country.

What seasonal eating actually means here

Strip away the temperate framing and the underlying principle survives intact. Seasonal eating means eating what the land near you is producing in abundance right now, because that food is cheaper, better and travelled less. In the tropics that translates into different habits:

• Follow the market, not the calendar. Whatever is piled highest and priced lowest this week is what is in season, and the stall holder will tell you plainly.
• Expect abundance and glut. Tropical harvests arrive all at once. This is why the region's culinary repertoire is full of ways to catch a surplus: fruit pulps frozen for juice, panela boiled down from cane, arequipe, dried beans, pickles.
• Use altitude as variety. A plate combining valley plantain with highland greens is eating two climates in one sitting, both local.
• Notice what is quietly always there. Plantain, cassava, beans, rice and eggs are the constants around which the variable produce rotates.

There is one honest limitation to name. Year-round abundance does not guarantee a varied diet — it makes variety easy, not automatic. A tropical valley can produce forty fruits and a household can still eat three.

Learning to read a market

The skill worth developing is not memorising a calendar; it is reading a market. What is piled in mountains? What is being sold by farmers rather than intermediaries? What are people buying in quantity rather than by the piece? Ask a vendor what is good this week and you will get a better answer than any guide could print, in any month of any year.

A valley with two harvests

Phoenix Oasis will open on 30 June 2028, on thirty hectares in Rivera, Huila, in the hot floor of the Magdalena valley with cooler farms within reach above it. The plan is for the kitchen to buy on that logic rather than against it: menus built from what the surrounding altitudes are producing that week, changing with the rains rather than with an imported idea of spring.

You can practise the habit anywhere. This week, walk to the nearest market instead of the supermarket, and buy the thing there is the most of. Find out more about what is being built on the retreats page.