Coffee is the world's second most valuable traded commodity after crude oil. Like for other crops, drought is the key factor affecting plant development, flowering, productivity, fruits development and their quality. In such a context, the generation of drought-tolerant coffee varieties has now turned into one of the priorities of many research institutes. In coffee, several candidate genes for drought tolerance have been identified. This was the case of CcDR EB1D that showed increased gene expression upon drought stress mainly in leaves of Coffea canephora drought-tolerant clones. In several plant species, the DREBs genes play a key role in plant responses to abiotic stress. Based on these information, an in depth characterization of CcDREB1D was initiated by (i) studying the genetic diversity present in DREB1D loci, (ii) identifying DREB coffee subfamily members and evaluating phylogenetic relations between CcDREB1D and homologs from other plant species, and ( iii) performing a functional characterization of CcDREB1D promoters by homologous genetic transformation of C. arabica. Sequence variability in DREB1D promoter and coding regions was evaluated using 38 Coffea accessions most of them characterized by different phenotypes (tolerance vs. susceptibility) regarding to drought. Our findings show several evidences of association between drought tolerance and the genetic variations on DREB1D promoter region. Further analyses indicated that these promoters are evolving by the rearrangement of cis-regulatory elements, and could influence DREB1D expression. The recent release of the C. canephora genome sequence allowed us to identify the DREB gene family in this species composed of at least 31 canonical DREB genes. Compared to other plants, no specific amplification of the DREB gene family was observed. A reconciled phylogenetic tree constructed with homologs from other species allowed us to identify the coffee members of the DREB subgroups I, II, III and IV, in refere