The LANDED Podcast

LANDED Podcast 036Rocío Florez – Founder of Gocta Natura

Rocío Florez is the Founder and CEO of Gocta Natura SAC and Gocta Natura Reserve. The reserve protects more than 200 acres in the Chachapoyas region of northern Peru—in the transition region between the Andes and the Amazon. For generations, the forest had been cut down to make way for cattle. Under Rocio’s leadership, the land is being rewilded to cloud-forest—habitat for birds, monkeys, and orchids. It is also the site of a lodge that allows guests to access the forest, one of the world’s tallest waterfalls, and the area’s ancient cultural sites.

Rocio holds a degree in Finance from California State University and a master’s degree in social management from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. She worked for 12 years at the World Bank, where she led the Peru chapter of a Hygiene Behavioral Change Research Program, while also providing support to initiatives across Latin America.

In 2009, she moved to the Amazonas region of Peru and established a sustainable development project in Cocachimba, in partnership with local communities, the private sector, and the National University Toribio Rodríguez de Mendoza of Chachapoyas. The initiative combined community capacity building, including the Children’s Forest Rangers program developed with the University, rewilding and reforestation, communication for change, and women’s leadership and economic empowerment. Over time, these efforts evolved into a rewilding hospitality model that integrates conservation, community development, and meaningful guest experiences.

Today, Gocta Natura is a certified B Corp and a signatory of the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs).

Rather read than listen? Find the transcript below

Today we’re talking about your lodge, Gocta Reserva, in the north of Peru. You found this property with your husband on a birthday trip.

Exactly. We had not been in that area ever, so we decided to go and learn about the archaeological sites of that area in Peru, visit all the archaeological sites and wander around. We took a 7-day trip, it was a nice amount of days to visit almost everything. And we saved not knowingly, but knowingly I guess, the best for the last.

Gocta and Cocachimba are famous for their waterfall. Some people say this is the highest waterfall in the world. I don’t know what your thoughts are.

Well, they say the third tallest, but still, there are discussions about that as well. So we decided to go because someone told us about the waterfall. It was not in our map and we entered the area, where you have to go back through the same road. So you go in and the final part is the town of Cocachimba. From there the view is amazing because there are all these cliffs surrounding the small town and the area.

We entered just after the rain had stopped and the sun came out. When it rains a lot of water, all the cliffs have waterfalls in different sizes, but Gocta is the main one in size. We really were astonished with the beauty of the place from the very beginning.

That’s great. Now, I think when most North Americans think of Peru, they have a picture of the Andes, which probably includes something like Machu Picchu. And Machu Picchu is in a transition zone between the high Andes and the Amazon. Gocta and Cocachimba are also in sort of an Amazon high Andean location, but you’re a cloud forest location.

Yes, exactly. We are in the lower part of the Andes, the newest part of the Andes. Landscape, by the way, is one of the attractions as well because it’s just beautiful. Wherever you go, whether to an archaeological site or when trekking, you will encounter these amazing views at some point. It is the Amazonian basin as you were saying, but it is high and it is cloud forest as well.

And when we think of cloud forest, we think especially of birds.

Yes, we have beautiful birds, some of them really in danger of extinction like the spatula tails hummingbird, but we have a wide variety of birds. And we learned about that as the time went by.

For the past five or six years, I’ve had ornithologists come once a year to do an inventory to see how we were doing. So right now, in the property, we have over 180 varieties. And in time, we’ve learnt to plant for them. The spatula tail needsone type of flower, and the Tanagers need another type of tree, and so on.

Conservation in Action: Community-Led Tourism in CocachimbaRocío when you found this land it wasn’t what it should be. It wasn’t the native jungle, the cloud forest. It had been cleared for cattle.

Yes, cattle and agriculture. But I understood that as soon as I met the community and families. From the beginning, I would visit frequently, ever since we bought our first piece of land while returning from our first trek to Gocta. We would get to know about the families there and so that’s how we started for instance understanding why they cut trees. It is just a family economic matter. They plant beans or coffee for subsistence.

But what happened in the meantime, was that tourism started coming. In most instances, they have left their land alone to grow, because they’re fully engaged as a community in tourism. There are well-trained guides locally. They are those who take the tourists on horseback all the way, especially back from the waterfall. Small hotels have arrived and restaurants as well, but very mildly. So, it still is a very nice little town. And so tourism in a way has replaced and has become a source of income for the families.

Well, it goes beyond the guiding and the hospitality. It goes to the food, it goes to the transportation. And in many cases when this happens, we’re also seeing a reduction in poaching. And people who maybe formerly made their lives as hunters become some of the best wildlife guides.

Yeah, that has been the transition which we’ve experienced. We got there 17 years ago and the waterfall had been discovered to the world in 2006. As it was only 3 years after that, we’ve seen the growth of tourism and specialized tourism as you were saying, the bird watchers and people from different parts of the world and also from Peruvians.

A Private Home in the Forest: The Personal Story of Gocta NaturaYou have no background in hospitality and it wasn’t your intention to open a hotel. This was a home you built and then you added a cabin for friends and now that’s evolved into six cabins and you’ve generously decided to share this place with the rest of the world.

It happened slowly, very slowly because as you say, I didn’t have any background in hospitality. The first years, we would stay in town with the families, so we got to know the families and the families got to know us. Then we decided to build a home, as you were saying. but a large home.

The main area of the home was a very large living room with a kitchenette and our room, and then one additional cabin. My daughter is an architect so it was really great that she had to design it.

And then along with the main area, we built one cabin and we had people that know, friends of ours from Lima come and stay there for a while. It became obvious that we needed more space and we built two more.

At that time, I was cautiously thinking about hospitality, but not really. I was engaged in projects that we would do with the community like the program to build young kids into the value of their place and the value of the environment and the forest.

I was reluctant. I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy being a host or receiving people. So, we opened up in a very private way. The gate was closed and reservations had to be made in advance. So, we started receiving people and they would come to a home and they would eat like you eat at home and they had a wonderful time and so that started growing.

I want to circle back to two things you’ve said. One is that you bought the land the day you saw it.

Yes. We bought the first piece of land when we were coming back from the waterfall. My husband asked the guide, “Do you know if anyone is selling a piece of land?” And I just froze because I thought this is it, this is it because I love this place. I didn’t even turn around because I didn’t want to ruin the magic. So, yes, we left the place committed to paying for that piece of land. We had thought about retiring, so it made sense. And we had always thought about going to the country and doing something there, but we didn’t know what at all. And so, yes, it was from the beginning. And then what followed was that I would come back and then they would show us another piece of land. And the reserve now is made up of different pieces of land that we started buying and we have 84 hectares.

The second point I wanted to emphasize is that before you built a hotel, you worked for many years with the local community with children to reforest the land.

Yes. First of all, we did a public private partnership with a firm that was willing to fund half of a program that was very successful in the south of Peru. And we brought the person that is the director and founder of that program to Cocachimba to share what they’ve done in the south with the families in Cocachimba.

And so they accepted to work on it. It lasted about two years and it targeted the point of improving the economy in the family. So they would learn to save the water to have gardens, vegetable gardens, with drip irrigation or covered and they would learn about nutrition as well and many other sustainable technologies.

That lasted two years. And it was really beautiful because someone who had the experience of the project in the south would come and live with everyone for three months and work with them on this concept. So that was beautiful.

The other one was that I started a program that was called forest rangers of Balera which is the district. I invited kids from 8 to 14 years and during four years we worked on that beautiful program. I enjoy it so much. I had volunteers coming from Finland and they would work with the kids once a week. We would meet and we would do expeditions and we would visit the main university in Chachapoyas, which is the capital, and we would have you know sessions at the lab or we would visit the barn that they have there. Very high-tech university in Chachapoyas. So it was really fun and that lasted for years and those children are now grown-ups. They have worked with us at times and they’re going to university in different places like Chachapoyas or the city of Tarapoto or the city of Chiclayo and they’re learning different things: architects, one lawyer, communications and they come during their break and some of them work with us. And that’s so rewarding to see them grown and coming back. Beautiful.

Rather than moving to the big city in the hope of finding. So the families are kept intact, the generations and they’re reinvesting in the community.

Exactly. They come back and they do for instance a website for the local association of tourism. They do the web page or they build houses. So that’s really beautiful. So yes, I engaged in those two mainly the first years until 2014 when our main house was ready.

So the lodge designed by your daughter, the food designed by your son Matias.

Isn’t that beautiful? Yes. So my daughter, you know, she designed the cabins and the main house. And then she decided to stop her career and that was the last thing she did. That was so beautiful. She’s now a very well-known watercolor artist and conducting this program of well-being through watercolors.

And Matias came from his first trip in Australia and got connected with Gocta Natura and the people and the community and the kitchen, of course. So it started changing. It started widening in the sense that we started learning together about the people that grow in different areas of the Utcubamba Valley. And so we would go and meet the women of Kuelap, this locality, where they grow their own tubers and potatoes and peppers, their own way following the cycles of the moon. We learned about them and we started buying because their product was not beautiful but it was wonderful. You know it didn’t get to the markets. It didn’t have a demand but it started having a demand in time because of the story because of the care. We started growing in that sense and so Matias started designing every dish. Every food had an inspiration in an area that we had visited, in the produce that we had bought and we became connected with the area as such from the start of the Utcubamba River to almost when it flows into the Marañón and into the Amazonas. So it widened our scope of view and understanding and love for the place.

And Matias he’s been working with Virgilio and Pía.

Yeah, I think it was his first job when he came from his training stay in Australia and he worked for a year or so. And then he went off to do a small business of catering and then very soon afterwards he opened up his first coffee place, it was a small restaurant in Barranco and he started creating right there. It was different what he offered. It was a different food. It was creative in the dish, in the textures and in the taste of course. And then this restaurant became a chain. Now they have I believe three in other places. Mó bistro or Mó cafe.

And how many people from the local community are you employing today?

Today I’m employing 11 people from the community and three more from Lima or Tarapoto as well. The chef is from Tarapoto. And what we do is, when we have a full house, we have several people come. We work with women a lot. And if they have a family and younger kids, it is great for them to have a way of generating income for a few days. Like they stay one week or 10 days. We do that in the maintenance of the garden, the vegetable garden and the forest.

A full house for you is..

20 is the fullest. Nice for me is 16.

So you have six cabins. Those are designed for two adults, but the day beds are perfect for a child.

Yes, it’s perfect for a child. And then we have the last one, number six. It has a mezzanine with two beds and an additional can enter as well.

So beyond the waterfall and the cloud forest and the birds and the coffee and the food, people come to this region for the ancient culture, you have several sites famous for their mummies and sarcophagi and you have the cloud forest city of Kuelap.

We enjoy doing the itineraries as well. We offer our guests the full package and we try to manage the distances so that it isn’t too long in one day. And yes, it is just gorgeous. It’s just amazing because you mentioned the sarcophagi or the mausoleums that are in the cliffs. So what I was saying before, you get to see them, but also see the landscape and where they worked and how they placed their sarcophagi in the cliff overlooking the sunrise, overlooking these landscapes is really beautiful. It’s really a magical moment.

I have groups that go to visit one site in particular that is called El Tigre and it has several different sarcophagi in one cave. It’s quite high and I have people get really emotional after seeing them standing there overlooking the sunrise. It is beautiful.

And then of course Kuelap is the best known and is the main citadel, multi-purpose citadel is well kept. It’s been restored wisely and so it’s really beautiful to go. But there are many other citadels that you can see at the top of other mountains.

You can connect the visit a town, visit a citadel in other sites or visit Kuelap and there are more archaeology sites surrounding Kuelap. It is really an experience for the guests to get here and normally you don’t encounter people as well or as many people. If you visit July, you’re going to see a lot of people, but if you come in February, it’s the best, very quiet, and you can take your time. If you have a good guide, it’s really important because the information that they can give is really, really interesting.

Logistics: you’re 50 minutes north of the Chucho airport, which is the main flight connection to Lima.

Exactly. We have daily flights to Chachapoyas in the morning and yes, it’s only 50 minutes in quite good highway. So, you will reach our place very soon. And since it comes in the morning, you can also do some visits that day as well before coming to us, like walking through the city that is really beautiful, or visit the canyon surrounding the airport and then come you know in the afternoon maybe eat lunch in Chachapoyas as well and come to us.

Kuelap is a full day. It’s about 2 hours two and a half to the south.

Yes, it is a full day. So you visit that and you can stop in the way to see certain sarcophagi or hieroglyphs in the way to Kuelap. If you live very early to Kuelap, you can do something else, one more thing, like eat lunch by the river across from Kuelap and visit other ruins as well.

Do you take people to Leimebamba?

I’ve done that. At the beginning it would be early in the morning to Leimebamba and then coming back to go to Kuelap which is really a lot, but some years ago I started doing that they would stay one night. So the itinerary would include a night or two if they wanted to in Leimebamba because there’s beautiful sites to visit in that area as well and then go to the museum. And then the next day visit ruins on your way back. Now we’re avoiding it because the highway from Tingo, where Kuelap is, to Leimebamba is not in good shape. Supposedly they’re going to start building a new one or repairing it thoroughly. We hope. And then we’re going to go back to Leimebamba because it is just beautiful as well and it has a lot to offer. So

One day I’m going from your hotel to Leimebamba. And then I’m continuing to Cajamarca.

Perfect. Yes. The road is not very good, but people do it. And there are, you know, people going that way as well. And they say the scenery is just beautiful. I haven’t done it. You can also head to the Laguna Los Condor from Leimebamba. Very beautiful, but a little bit of a hard trail with very expert guides and horses and stuff. So, it’s a whole adventure.

Horseback riding is one of the most special ways to encounter this landscape.

Yes, we don’t have many horses for unaccompanied riding yet, but we have local guides with horses who can accompany you for long distances. At every destination, you will find horses to get to where you are going. At Gocta Natura, hopefully this year or next, we are going to have this, since we have plenty of space for wandering and are building a road into a previously unvisited area. We are going to have a mulas just riding in an open dirt road with trees from one place to the other.

Although you may not have been trained in hospitality, you clearly have a natural gift for it. What is hospitality to you?

Hospitality, it’s a warm, attentive, informed way of receiving a guest for us.

Reaching out before he or she comes, getting to know their interests or the special tastes or restrictions or their preferences in general before they get there. So there is a familiarity when they arrive.

It is about sharing what you care about the most, what we have built. The passion and care and love placed in each detail, because it makes for a wholesome stay. It connects with well-being, feeling well, forgetting what happened before or your thoughts and getting into this place that surprises you. Even though we send pictures and we say it’s a reserve -we don’t say it’s a hotel- there is an element of surprise when our guests get there. Because they arrive and are driven into a forest and then they are walked by one of us to their cabins. And as soon as they get to the cabin, they understand that it is private, that you can sit at the desk and rest, that you have freshly brewed coffee or tea or an apple to eat while you’re sitting on your deck and they are surprised by that. They normally smile. They normally tell you something, that’s really so beautiful for us.

And then the food that we serve is placed in the dish with care. It has been conceived with care. Hospitality is about our guests sitting at the end of the day in the living room with a chimney on, or just sitting by the pool or just walking through our botanical garden through our trails in the forest and coming back thrilled and sitting at the table. A beautiful set table with produce and decorations, but nice and warm all along and having a wonderful meal.

But we started doing the itineraries because we thought -or we learned- that our guests would go in cars or with guys with a different treatment on a day itinerary, on a full day, and come back tired and with a different mood. We started designing the itineraries making sure that they would get our hospitality model inside the car and all along the trail and visit and stuff. So if they wanted to have a coffee, they would have it, or a fruit in the way, they would eat it. And then our guides started learning about Gocta mode.

So what I’m hearing you say is that you’re sharing your special dream, that you’re presenting it with love and attention and warmth, that you’re really welcoming people into this world. You know, when a baby is born, they receive a few things. Eye contact, warmth, and human connection, and something to eat.

Exactly. That’s what we do. And when I say we, I really mean my team. The team is just wonderful. And when a new one comes, that knowledge or that way of doing things, it flows. So we are all happy doing what we do and providing just enough, I would say, quality for them to feel comfortable. Because too much is not as pleasant as just doing it with care and style but just enough. There are sitting places on different roads so that people can sit and be.

The concept I’ve been thinking about lately is transformation. Given the limited time that we have with our travelers, how do we affect transformation? I know this is something you’ve been thinking about. Some of the things that we’ve talked about, natural beauty, the awe of a waterfall or of an ancient culture, the wonder of birds and being in a cloud forest, and the connection with your staff. All of those things create the opportunity for meaning and deeper connection with those that they’re traveling with.

Yes, totally. The time competes with that because it is best when you have a free afternoon to just be. And it is common for our guests to change their itineraries and say, “No, tomorrow I don’t want to do anything. I just want to stay here.”

And since we do a special itinerary visit to the waterfall, there are certain ways. You can leave at 5:15 a.m. with your breakfast on the horse and a guide, and go to see the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (Peru’s national bird). We do that. It’s just magic to get there and see them early in the morning in their sessions of getting ready for the rest of the day. These huge birds, the female and the flirting with the male and the young ones and everything. You can see 15 of them in these canopies in the forest. So you can spend time with those noisy encounters. So that is an experience that ends eating breakfast by the waterfall and then they come back early. That is a wonderful day to just stay in Gocta and do a small walk or have a massage or just read. You leave with that little piece of transformation which means just enjoying yourself in nature for a while.

The Art of Transformational Travel: Connecting with Peru’s WildernessRocío, just talking with you is calming.

Oh, thank you so much. I love what I do. I love what I do so much. And now you know what I can tell you now is that I’m planning to start again the forest rangers of Valera program with the new generations, most of them kids from our own people in school. I’m preparing a project to be funded that has to do with the reforestation of a specific endemic palm tree that is called Ceroxylon Peruvianum. We’re planning to in partnership with other institutions to reproduce these trees genetically and to expand the forest with them inside. We have like 36 in our forest and they’ve been studied. They have a lot of specialties and they’re beautiful and we’re looking for funding to do that to do 40 hectares of forest and we have sometimes the kids from school come over and do something like plant trees or do games in the forest. I’m planning to do a remake of the Guardabosques program linked to the new forest. The program has been accepted. Now I have to really work on the design. It is really what keeps me going. It’s really my soul, something I’ve learnt, how it has transformed me.

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