The Big Coffee Bean

Mareeba, Queensland, Australia

Roadside giants

Current – limited access

Recently confirmed · Sep 2026

This Big Thing is still here, but public access is limited. Check the access notes for details before visiting.

A giant coffee bean at Jaques Coffee Plantation in Mareeba.

Limited access
Check the access notes for details before visiting
P
Parking
onsite

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

No recommended arrival yet

We have not checked a recommended place to arrive or stop here yet.

This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

The Big Coffee Bean

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Site-level location · 16.9622° S, 145.4392° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

A giant coffee bean at a plantation that actually grows coffee, which in Australia is a short list.

Jaques Coffee Plantation at Mareeba is a working operation – its own material sells whole beans and grinds by the kilogram carton and by subscription, with a coffee lounge open to group bookings rather than to the public.

Australian coffee growing is a genuine but very small industry. The Atherton Tablelands and a few pockets in northern New South Wales are the only areas where it works commercially, and total national production is negligible against imports. What Australia does have is mechanical harvesting: the terrain here allows machine picking, which almost nowhere else in the coffee world can do, and that is the technical distinction the district trades on.

So the bean is not a borrowed image. It marks one of the few places in the country where coffee comes out of the ground rather than off a ship.

The Tablelands run an unusual concentration of crops for their size – coffee here, peanuts at Tolga, mangoes, avocados, sugar down the range – and the district holds several catalogue entries as a result.

A coffee bean is also a good subject formally. The single deep crease down one face is what makes it instantly readable; without that groove it would simply be a brown lump. Very few objects in this collection depend so completely on one feature.

Mareeba sits west of Cairns in drier country than the coast, which is precisely why the crops here differ from the wet tropics below.

Who built it, how big it is and when it went up are not recorded.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

The Big Coffee Bean is associated with the working Jaques Coffee plantation at 137 Leotta Road. Current first-party guidance says the Coffee Lounge is group-booking only; the catalogue now separates the correct plantation site from the still-unresolved exact Bean position and casual-access question.

ACCESS

The Big Coffee Bean is associated with Jaques Coffee Plantation at 137 Leotta Road, Mareeba. The former PBT point was about 5 km away in Mareeba and came from an unreliable aggregator; production now uses the independently mapped Jaques plantation site at -16.962196, 145.439221 as a site anchor only, not an exact Bean position. Jaques currently accepts functions and pre-arranged groups rather than general walk-ins, so casual direct navigation remains withheld.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

A large white Brahman bull statue outside the Mareeba Heritage Museum and Visitor Information Centre in Centenary Park.

Animals and creatures

3.8 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

ExplorOz – Jaques Coffee Plantation and Cafe mapped place

ExplorOz · recorded 2026-09-11

Mapped Jaques Coffee Plantation at -16.962196, 145.439221. Used only as the host-site anchor, not as an exact Big Coffee Bean coordinate or casual visitor arrival.

Community

Jaques Coffee Plantation official site

Jaques Australian Coffee · recorded 2026-08-22

Official

Probian October 2021 – Jaques visit

Probus Association of Queensland · recorded 2026-08-22

Community

Queensland Things of Interest 2026 census

Kaylene Ki / Things of Interest · recorded 2026-08-22

Other

WorldPlaces – Jaques Coffee Plantation

WorldPlaces · recorded 2026-08-22

Rejected for geometry on 2026-09-11: this aggregator coordinate (-17.00638, 145.42037) is about 5 km from Jaques Coffee Plantation at 137 Leotta Road and must not support object/site location.

Other

What we're still checking

The plantation is verified, but the exact position of the bean within the site still needs checking.

A fresh current photograph of the Big Coffee Bean is still needed.

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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