La Ceja

Half an hour beyond El Retiro, a bit higher, a good deal bigger and alive in a completely different way.

I called it a village on the way and that was nonsense. La Ceja has over sixty thousand inhabitants and it is a town with everything that goes with it: streets full of shops, restaurants next to restaurants, people outside. Not a tourist village that shuts at six and goes dark. A town that lives its own life and is not checking whether you are watching.

We happened to arrive on a Sunday and there was a market in the park.

The Sunday market here is an institution, not an attraction for visitors. The stalls took over the whole park and had absolutely everything: fruit, vegetables, cheeses, bread, flowers, handmade things. And local fruit wines, a category I had no idea existed until that moment.

A cacao pod that looks like a dragon egg

One stall had cacao, but not as powder and not as a bar. The whole pod, the way it grows on the tree.

I had never seen one before and I did not expect it to be that big and that strange. A hard shell, deep grooves along it, a colour somewhere between yellow and rust. It looks like an egg out of a fairy tale. Inside, the beans sit in white pulp and nothing about it suggests it will one day be chocolate.

The beans are unbelievably intense. Dark chocolate without sugar, only far more itself. Anyone who thinks they know what cacao tastes like from a bar is in for a correction.

The market hall and fruit I had never met

Besides the Sunday market, La Ceja has a large covered market hall, and that one is open all the time.

That is where I tasted granadilla. It looks like a passion fruit that grew up and calmed down: a hard orange shell, white foam under it and greyish jelly seeds inside. You break it open with your hands like an egg and eat it with a spoon, or simply slurp it out.

It is not passion fruit. Passion fruit is sour enough to tear your mouth apart; granadilla is sweet, gentle and barely acidic. If you avoid passion fruit, this might be for you.

Coffee with a view of the market

Just off the park there is a café looking down on the market from above.

Excellent coffee, seating outside, palm trees, and under them the whole Sunday bustle. One of those moments you travel eight thousand kilometres for: nothing special is happening, you are just sitting there and you feel good.