Our stop here was a first for Holland America Line. Ilheus is a charming town of 250,000 with a mixture of African and European descendants but there are no African colonies like there are in Salvador.
Ilheus was established in 1534 by the Portuguese. Jesuits began cultivating cacao plants in the 1700's and by the next century cacao was Brazil's second most important export.
In the mid 1980's the cacao plantations were devastated by a fungus called "vassoura da bruxa" or "witches' broom" because the fungus left defoliated branches resembling a broom. Exports dropped from 400,000 kilos annually to 90,000. Farmers abandoned or burned their fields, the wealthy cacao barons lost their fortunes. Since 2003 the government has been supporting cacao production by the introduction of cloning or grafting healthy trees to old ones. The economy is improving and Ilheus has also become an important tourist center due to its beautiful beaches.
We saw the home of George Amado, the most popular writer in Brazil. We visited a working cacao plantation. Farmers plant banana trees around the cacao trees to provide shade since vast amounts of rainforests in Brazil have disappeared and therefore natural rain and shade are not available.
Workers pick the pods by hand and place them into baskets carried by mules. What tedious work! Pods are then split open and the seeds are allowed to ferment, then are dried in the sun. Cocoa is extracted from the beans and processed into cocoa butter, cocoa and chocolate.
We indulged our sweet tooth at a German chocolate store. What a wonderful day in Ilheus in the state of Bahia!
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