ILHEUS, BRAZIL

What a delightful place and informative tour we took! The city was founded in 1534 and is now a tourist destination of about 222,000. It has five rivers and a series of bays and lagoons, and has many beautiful beaches. In the 1700s the Jesuits began cultivating cacao plants and by the next century cacao was Brazil’s second most important export, next to sugar cane.

This “black gold” created a new society, the ‘Cacao Colonels’ who didn’t have much education but had lots of money. Since Colonel was a military term denoting power, they called themselves Colonels. They often killed each other for power and cacao plantations. Even today the impoverished children of these formerly wealthy citizens call themselves the ‘child of Colonel X’ or the ‘nephew of Colonel Y‘, etc.

Ilheus gets 222 days of rain a year, mostly overnight which results in 90% humidity. Cacao trees need this to produce pods. They have blossoms and pods on the same tree, in various stages of development year round, but most of the harvesting is done between March-April and October-November. The cocoa farms or plantations are not set up in neat rows like coffee or tea plantations are, but grow haphazardly in the jungle. Banana trees are always near by, because they provide shade for new seedlings until they are strong enough to get it from the natural jungle trees. The pods are harvested by hand and collected in baskets carried by mules.

For 50 years German families owned and operated the cacao plantations, but left them to the Brazilians in about 1900-1910. Production continued until the mid 1980’s when a fungus called “witch’s broom” infested the trees and because of a severe drought, quickly spread destroying entire plantations. This lasted for ten years causing people to lose their fortunes and for the town to lose income and fall into a recession. They are slowly recovering from this devastating loss, which is evident in the dilapidated condition of the formerly beautiful mansions and the empty cacao processing factories.

For the past 40 years they have been “cloning” or grafting healthy cacao shoots onto larger trees in an effort to restore the plantations, as well as studying the DNA structure of the fungus to try to control it. It still appears on some healthy trees, which are immediately cut down and burned to prevent further spread.

None of the cocoa pod is wasted -- the outside husks are used for natural fertilizer, the slippery white coating around the bean is used to make a drink mixed with sugar and water, and the cocoa beans themselves are dried and then processed to produce cocoa butter, chocolate and cocoa powder.

Ilheus is the hometown of Jorge Amado, the best known and most popular writer in Brazil whose novels depict the lives of poor urban and rural black and mulatto communities of Bahia. Many of the local restaurants, bars and hotels are named after his novels or characters in it.

The streets are wide, the buildings are colorful, although sadly in need of repairs, and the people are friendly, making this one of our more pleasant stops.