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Cocoa Museum Baracoa Cuba

Museo del chocolate Baracoa

The Cocoa House or Casa de Cacao Baracoa stands majestically in the historic center of the city of Baracoa. The museum exhibits elements of history relating to the cultivation of Cocoa in the region and, as an added bonus, the history of the Mayan culture since it was they who initially started to cultivate cocoa around the year 600.

The Cocoa Museum of Baracoa showcases a host of interesting tools and artifacts covering the whole process of not only the production of Cocoa but also its past marketing and health benefits that only today are physicians rediscovering. Of course, the museum also focuses on the local peasant traditions and the slave trade associated with such cultivations.

Visitors get to see up close and personal all of the manual techniques and rudimentary chocolate preparation processes right from the initial cocoa mass. The museum showcases the treatments of the grains, their sun drying process in large drawers and finally the toasting on wood fires in special pots, cleaning and milling.

Visitors can also process raw chocolate to make delicious treats by adding the sweet spices and wheat flour or bananas to make the final product which are small balls of chocolate, chocolate bars or the powder used in many drinks.

The walls also display colorful and giant billboards explaining how chocolate came to the western world via historic cocoa marketing and how it was received in some regions of the world

Above being a museum, The Cocoa House is also equipped as a modern chocolate factory for the production of tasty chocolates and chocolate bars. This whole process can be watched by visitors and they can even buy some freshly made chocolate from the factory.