Antigua Countryside Villages Private Buggy Tour

Overview

This private buggy tour reaches villages around Antigua that most visitors miss, including a nut farm, a handicraft market, a wine-producing community, and Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala's short-lived second capital.

A private buggy tour into the countryside around Antigua, visiting real village stops beyond the usual sights: a nut farm, a local handicraft market, a small wine-producing community, and Ciudad Vieja, which briefly served as Guatemala's second colonial capital before it was destroyed by a 1541 lahar from Volcán de Agua.

Highlights

• Ciudad Vieja Guatemala's real second capital, destroyed in 1541 and now a quiet town south of Antigua.
• Nut Farm A working farm stop, off the typical Antigua tour route.
• Handicraft Market A small local market for authentic crafts.
• Wine-Producing Community A real, lesser-known wine-making community near Antigua.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

This private buggy tour reaches villages around Antigua that most visitors miss, including a nut farm, a handicraft market, a wine-producing community, and Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala's short-lived second capital. A private buggy tour into the countryside around Antigua, visiting real village stops beyond the usual sights: a nut farm, a local handicraft market, a small wine-producing community, and Ciudad Vieja, which briefly served as Guatemala's second colonial capital before it was destroyed by a 1541 lahar from Volcán de Agua.

Ciudad Vieja's history is one of the most dramatic in the Americas' colonial era, and it's a real, verifiable one. The Spanish first founded their Guatemalan capital at Tecpán in 1524, but relocated it to this valley at the base of Volcán de Agua in 1527, naming it Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala. It lasted only fourteen years: on the night of September 11, 1541, after days of heavy rain, the crater lake near the volcano's summit gave way, sending a massive lahar — a wall of volcanic mud, water, and debris — down the mountainside and through the capital. Hundreds were killed, including Beatriz de la Cueva, widow of conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, who had been named governor just days before her death, briefly making her one of the first women to formally govern a Spanish colony in the Americas. Survivors refounded the capital at a new site in 1543 — the valley now known as Antigua — and what remained of the original settlement became the quiet town of Ciudad Vieja that the buggy reaches today.

The wine stop is a genuine rarity: Guatemala has essentially one commercial winery, and it sits in this same cluster of villages south of Antigua, on the slopes of the very volcano that destroyed Ciudad Vieja. An American economist planted the first vines there in 1997, after being told by Guatemala's own Ministry of Agriculture that grapes couldn't be grown in the country's rainy climate — he brought in a Californian winemaker, tried roughly two dozen grape varieties from Washington State and Napa, and by 2008 was producing a chardonnay, merlot, and cabernet sauvignon good enough that the operation began exporting internationally a few years later. It remains the only vineyard of its kind in Central America, grown at close to 6,000 feet on volcanic soil that, as with the region's coffee, owes its character to the same mountain that nearly erased this valley's history.

Macadamia growing near Antigua is a more recent, equally homegrown story — it dates only to the 1980s, when a small group of growers began breeding local varieties suited to Guatemala's climate and, over the following decades, gave away hundreds of thousands of seedlings to help small farmers across the highlands plant their own trees rather than keep the crop concentrated on one estate. Reaching a working nut farm, a real handicraft market, and a backroad wine community in one day is exactly what the open-air buggy format is built for here: Sacatepéquez's village roads outside the main highway are largely unpaved, winding, and steep enough on the volcano's lower slopes that a standard tour van would struggle, which is why operators run this specific route in small off-road vehicles rather than the minivans used on Antigua's more typical city-and-market circuits.