All activities / Culinary / Cooking / Punta Gorda
Culinary / Cooking in Punta Gorda
The small, end-of-the-road capital of Belize's Toledo District in the far south, a Garifuna, Maya and Creole town surrounded by the country's cacao heartland. The base for Maya chocolate farms and the annual Toledo Cacao Festival.
Why here
Toledo is the cradle of Belizean cacao, where Maya families have grown Theobroma cacao for well over a thousand years and still ferment and grind it much as their ancestors did. Around Punta Gorda you can spend a day working bean to bar: walking a shaded cacao farm, splitting a ripe pod for its sweet white pulp, roasting and hand-grinding the beans on a stone metate, and drinking the bitter, chilli-spiked chocolate the Maya once treated as sacred. The Toledo Cacao Festival each May turns the whole district into a celebration of it. This is chocolate learned from the people who first domesticated it, not a factory tour bolted onto a resort, and the growers here supply beans to some of the world's best chocolate makers.
Best months
Farm and chocolate-making tours run year-round and are best booked a day ahead, since the Maya-run farms are small and family-operated. The main cacao harvest and the Toledo Cacao Festival fall around May. Punta Gorda is remote and hot; the drier months from February to May are the most comfortable for farm walks.
Getting there & around
Punta Gorda is a five to six hour drive south from Belize City, or a short flight to the PG airstrip, so most visitors stay a night or two. The Maya cacao farms are in villages a short drive inland, reached by local bus or as part of a booked tour, while the in-town chocolate makers are walkable in Punta Gorda itself. Confirm farm visits in advance.
Skill levels: beginner, intermediate
Schools & guides (2)
Cotton Tree Chocolate
OutfitterCotton Tree Chocolate is a small-batch, bean-to-bar maker on Front Street in Punta Gorda, founded by Jeff Pzena and Erin Andrews. It buys beans from the local Maya cacao farmers' co-op and makes each batch from a single farmer's single-day harvest, using improvised tools: coffee roasters to roast the beans, a hand drill to crack them, a hair dryer to winnow and a juicer to grind. Visitors can watch the whole process on a short, free walk-through of the workshop.
Ixcacao
SchoolIxcacao Maya Belizean Chocolate is a Maya-owned farm and chocolate maker in the village of San Felipe, about eleven miles from Punta Gorda, run by Juan and Abelina Cho. Its tiered tours walk you through a working rainforest cacao farm, a traditional Maya cacao ceremony, and hands-on grinding and chocolate making, finishing with a Maya meal cooked by Abelina, known across Toledo as the Chocolate Queen. The family built the business independently, without outside investment.