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The Chocolate of the Ecuador Amazon

Along with rubber and Brazil nuts, cacao is perfectly suited to the Amazon, where the trees grow wild along river banks, shaded from the sun by the rainforest canopy in a soil made fertile by the ever-decomposing forest. Unlike the plantation-style growing conditions that many cacao trees cultivated in Ecuador’s coastal regions must endure, the Amazon Rainforest provides a stress-free existence that makes cacao trees disease-resistant.

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The Chocolate of the Ecuador Amazon

Scientists believe that it is in the Amazon Rainforest regions of what today belong to Ecuador and Colombia where the cacao tree most likely originated. Today, many varieties of cacao trees grow here, their beans being used by chocolate processors to give chocolate its distinctive taste. In the Ecuador Amazon, cacao grows mostly in small groves, intermingled with other trees. Most valued here is the country’s famed Arriba tree, a species that fungal diseases devastated in western Ecuador during the early 1900s but spared in the Napo River region.
The country’s largest areas of tropical rainforest are found in the lowlands of central and eastern Ecuador, providing the conditions that cacao desires—hot and humid. Since most indigenous populations in the Ecuador Amazon live along rivers, many communities are involved in harvesting the cacao that grows here. Some of these tropical rainforest areas are protected, such as Ecuador’s largest mainland national park, Yasuni National Park, 507,000-acre Sumaco Napo-Galeras National Park in the northwestern Oriente and the vast Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, 1.5 million acres in the northeastern Oriente, spanning the border with Colombia and Peru.
Could there be a more exotic experience than eating chocolate from the Amazon Rainforest in the Amazon Rainforest? Southern Explorations offers several different ways to travel to the Amazon Rainforest, including Ecuador tours that visit the environs of Yasuni National Park where cacao grows, the four to five day Napo Wildlife Center or La Selva Jungle Lodge trip and the eight-day Amazon Kayaking Adventure. If your Ecuador travel doesn’t take you to the Amazon Rainforest, you may sample Kallari chocolates from the Ecuador Amazon at the company’s namesake café in the downtown La Mariscal neighborhood.

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