Coffea arabica var. laurina has been regarded by several authors as being originally from the Reunion Islands, or from Arabia, according to others.. In Brazil, it has been known for many years under the name of Smyrna coffee. Laurina plants have a conical shape and are shorter than those of the typica variety of Coffea arabica. Their branching habit is denser and the internodes shorter than those of the last named variety. The leaves are elliptical, and the fruits and seeds are slightly pointed at the base. The laurina characteristics are controlled by the action of a single pair of recessives genes, lr lr. The wild type allele is completely dominant over Ir, and the F2 generation and backcrosses segregate into normal and laurina individuals. Appropriate tests have shown that laurina, as well as the bourbon variety, possesses the tt alleles. The Ir gene does not show any apparent interaction with t. When new introductions of laurina plants were crossed with plants known to be lr lr, only laurina phenotypes were found in the offspring. Only one plant has been obtained from the interspecific cross between laurina and Coffea canephora. Its leaves are intermediate in size, but the plant size and the color of the young leaves resemble the canephora parent. Although the coffee produced by laurina gives excellent cup quality, this variety has very limited economic value because its yields are much lower than that of selected strains of bourbon.