This is Jose Moore. His farm is in La Fe, Limon. La Fe is on the outskirts of Hone Creek on the way to Cahuita. Limon is the province. The county is Talamanca. José’s farm has been certified for over 25 years and being a family farm it meant his father was the owner before him. Here is a photo of José, and a couple photos from their farm below.
The first cacaotal, or cacao plantation, was registered in Costa Rica in 1610, and cacao was listed as merchandise in 1623. By 1640, plantations were numerous, used as collateral, and passed on to daughters as dowries. María de Santiago received 100 trees when she married in 1663. Cacao beans were also used for money when coins were in short supply, and la hora de chocolate, or the “chocolate hour,” was an evening ritual.
Then, bad luck struck in 1666, when British pirate Henry Morgan, with 800 of his Caribbean cohorts, ransacked Costa Rica, getting within 30 kilometres of Cartago, the former national capital east of San José, before being pushed back by the local militia. Perhaps they, too, craved chocolate because by then, the drink was popular with sailors. The notorious Zambos Mosquitos indigenous tribe, who hated the Spaniards’ heavy-handed treatment, allied with the Brits, making cacao cultivation uncertain.
But wealth was measured in cacao trees, and the crop was too important to abandon.
In the 1970s and ’80s, monilia pod rot made its way up the isthmus, almost stopping cacao cultivation. But production is increasing again as demand for quality and organic chocolate grows around the world, and plant technicians work to develop disease-resistant trees.
With an export market of more than 200 tons of dried organic cacao a year, the indigenous land of Talamanca is once again an important producer of one of the planet’s most popular and exclusive Costa Rican cacao
