Belmont Estates

This place you have to see to believe.

So because I am short on time, I will encourage you to take your own sightseeing trip through my slideshow and pick out the parts that interest you the most.

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Belmont is more than an hour’s drive up the island and into the interior. And it is what it is – a plantation estate. You know, those places where the French/English set up uppity agriculture operations and worked the land with slaves?

Yep, that kind of plantation.

The operation was started in the 1600s and is still going strong today.

However, now, in addition to producing chocolate, the plantation pumps out tourists like nobody’s business. There is even a museum. They call it agri-tourism, where you can see how your food is made and get a little taste at every step in the process.

Take the coco pod for example. No really, take it. And bust it open and taste the sweet, goopy seeds inside. The gloop on the seeds tastes kind of like Skittles.

Now don’t bite down! Once washed of its slime, that little seed needs to be fermented in a lot of rotten fruit before it becomes chocolate.

After sitting for about 5 days, the seeds see the daylight.

They are put out into drying beds where someone turns them over with their little toes every half hour. Like so …

After touching them with our dirty feet, we got to crack open the hard outer shell and taste the chocolate. Which actually tasted like very bitter dark chocolate. At this point, it is pushed through a machine into coco butter and then processed into whatever chocolate product you find on the shelves.

All of this is watched over by a few talkative parrots, some turtles and a monkey or two.

If you want to read more about Belmont Estates, click here.

Hope you enjoyed our (very) brief agri-tour!