The Pacific Lowlands, Chocó, Esmeraldas and Guayaquil

A Sense of Place

The Pacific lowlands of Colombia and Ecuador are one ecology with a border through it. Rain is the first fact. Lloró, in the Chocó, gets about 13,300 millimetres a year by the figures Colombia's meteorological institute gives the press, Quibdó about 10,500, López de Micay about 12,200, and it rains on twenty to twenty five days a month. We do not rank it against the rest of the world; one of the wettest coasts on earth is the claim the sources carry. The cooks say what the rain does to cooking. Nothing dries enough to burn, so the farming is fell, clear and let rot. Maize is kept on the cob and rice in the husk, hung above the hearth in the smoke, because shelled grain goes bad. Fish and game are smoked or salted. The herbs grow in a bed raised off the wet ground.

The four zones of the Colombian coast

The mangrove and the estuary, the bajo, give the piangua, the black cockle that women gather, with the blue crab, the piacuil, the clams and the river fish. The levees and terraces of the rivers grow plantain, maize, taro, cacao and the chontaduro palm, and the Ministry of Culture's book calls them the main farming ground of the Afro-descendant families. The coconut shore is the third pillar: maize on the high ground, plantain in the middle, coconut at sea level, which the Ministry describes as the riverine strategy of the freed communities. The forest edge gave game, hunted less now because the animals are scarce and some are on the red lists, and the Ministry's own footnote says not to hunt them.

The Chocó is 46,530 square kilometres, 82 per cent Afro-Colombian and 13 per cent Indigenous by the census figures the SENA book quotes. Its Atrato is rice, maize, river fish and plantain; its Pacific is fish and piangua; its Darién is beef and sea fish. The Wounaan live on the San Juan, the Emberá on the upper Atrato and the Baudó, the Awá on both sides of the Colombia and Ecuador line in the Nariño foothills. No Indigenous cook of this coast was heard by us, and their food is not here.

Buenaventura's municipality holds thirty one community councils of Black communities on 381,934 hectares, about 25,300 people, with 91 per cent of the municipality's population in the port city, 115 kilometres from Cali. Tumaco has three zones, the Ensenada estuary fed by seven rivers, the Mira river, and the road corridor to Pasto, and four trades carry its economy: cacao, coconut, fishing and shellfish gathering.

The kitchen as a place

The azotea is a rectangular wooden frame, or a retired canoe, raised one to two metres off the ground to keep animals and the damp away, filled with leaf litter, ant-nest earth and shells, in the home garden, owned and tended by women. It grows onion, tomato, poleo, basil and cilantro, and the herbs that make the coast taste of itself. The Ministry's cooks call it a space of women, and say cooking is learned "viendo, preguntando, cocinando y cantando". Enrique Sánchez Gutiérrez, of the Universidad de Antioquia, records a workshop in Tumaco where a group that would not cooperate began to work when one woman started an arrullo, the call and response song, and gave their verdict: "Cuando se cocina y se canta las cosas saben mejor." Fish is always served with plantain, the Tumaco cook Ernestina Matilde Ante says, "como se acostumbra en todo el Pacífico, donde lo uno no puede ir sin lo otro."

Esmeraldas, across the line

Ecuador's green north is the same forest and river world. The Bunche, the Cayapas, the Santiago and the Esmeraldas rivers carry fish and shrimp to the mangrove mouths, coconut, plantain and cacao are the garden crops, and the herbs are the same herbs under the Ecuadorian spelling: chillangua, chirarán, oreganón and basil, grown on rooftops. The towns the cooks name are Borbón, Limones, La Tola, Rioverde, San Lorenzo and Muisne. Celia Angulo, who runs a stall at the artisanal fishing port of Esmeraldas with nine other women, learned at her mother's hearth in the Santa Martha neighbourhood and traces her cooking to Borbón and Limones.

Manabí, Guayaquil and the dry south

Manabí is the coast's other kitchen: dry, toasted and ground. Peanut, maize, plantain, cheese and fish, the grinding stone, sal prieta as the condiment, viche and corviche as the dishes. The toquilla hat, the queso manaba and sal prieta are the three symbols of Manabita identity, the writer Libertad Regalado says. Guayaquil is a republican port at the head of its gulf whose food was made by the people who moved there, cholos from the peninsula, Manabitas, river people: encebollado, bolón, ceviche, rice with menestra. Beyond it the Guayas and Los Ríos lowlands are the montubio rice, cacao and banana country. The Santa Elena peninsula is salt fish and El Oro is bananas and shrimp, and for both of them we reached no cook from inside.

A table of peoples, logic and dishes

The History in Layers

Before the gold

The Tumaco-La Tolita culture, from about 600 BCE, were potters, fishers, farmers and seafarers whose horizon reached the mouths of the San Juan, and the Ministry's book gives their food base: fish, shellfish, game, maize and cassava, with squash, soursop, guava, cacao, pineapple and chontaduro. The Valdivia culture, the oldest pottery on the Ecuadorian coast, is credited in Jenny Estrada's history of the encebollado with cooking fish in clay over a wood fire; that is the dish's own origin story and no excavation is cited for it. Libertad Regalado says peanut and maize were grown in Manabí more than 9,000 years ago; that is her claim.

Gold, and the women who cooked for it

The Spanish wanted the Pacific for gold. A letter of 1590 from Nóvita in the Chocó, which the SENA book reproduces, describes a province "lastrada de oro" and short of people to dig it. Buenaventura's settlement dates to 1540 and grew round the mines of the Raposo river, worked by enslaved people, the gold going to Popayán; Llanobajo on the Anchicayá began as a mining town of enslaved people. Tumaco, founded in 1640, was the port for the Barbacoas mines into the twentieth century, and the cook Edilia Mosquera, born in Barbacoas, remembers cheese coming to the mines from Pasto in baskets and going on to Buenaventura. Slavery ended in Colombia in 1852.

Julia María Montaño, Mamá Julia, born in 1935 on the Chajal river, leader of Tumaco's artisans and cantaoras, gives the frame the whole coast's cooking is told in: the cocina esclavizada and the cocina libre. Enslaved Black women ran the kitchens of the haciendas and the mines. The ration was thirty two pairs of plantains, maize and salted meat, which the Chocó still calls carne caleña. From the enslaved family's food came the tapao and the bala of plantain, quick dishes devised at the meetings held for births, deaths and the planning of uprisings, which would serve "para la huida o para la vida en la manigua", for flight and for life in the forest, and always for the road. Escape and then freedom made the cocina libre: hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish, farming plantain and maize. Mamá Julia also says the freed and the enslaved learned maize from Indigenous people, and smoking, ageing and hunting with it. Sánchez Gutiérrez heard the same two periods from a Tumaco cook and adds a third, the years of the armed conflict.

The free rivers, and the law of 1993

After abolition the riverine communities grew by kinship, with each family's stretch of river and forest, and the Ministry's book says marrying into other rivers was how the families and the plantings spread; labour exchange and barter lasted into the twentieth century. Law 70 of 27 August 1993 recognised the collective property of Black communities on the rivers of the Pacific basin and made the Consejo Comunitario the body that holds it. Most farms on the coast now sit inside those collective territories. The late 1960s organising in Buenaventura around Bishop Gerardo Valencia Cano fed the Afro cultural groups that came before the law.

The territory that stopped being pacific

Every source that touches the present names it, and the cooks name it in their own lives. The Ministry's book records oil palm monoculture in Tumaco, armed conflict and displacement breaking the traditional production systems, mining waste and sand dredging killing the river fishing, oil from the trans-Andean pipeline and palm agrochemicals in the Tumaco rivers, and the communities' fear of a planned waterway through the mangrove channels between Buenaventura and Tumaco. Many of the women who cooked for the book were displaced people, and the cooking meetings, it says, were moments of happiness in "reencontrarse con lo propio". Sánchez Gutiérrez lists mercury in the rivers, dredges and backhoes run by armed groups, aerial fumigation of food crops, and the logging of the mangrove, and writes: "Era un territorio pacífico, pero dejó de serlo." The Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica's 2015 report on Buenaventura, "a port without a community", counts more than a third of the city's near 400,000 people as recognised victims; its figures for disappearances, killings and displacement reached us only through a search summary and are not printed. Elizabeth Valencia Caicedo, of Buenaventura: "Ya la mujer no va al bajo, ya no coge la piangua o el camarón chambero." Lorena Tejada, on the Mayorquín, says the jaiba is scarce now. Marcelina Villa Venté says everything costs more because people go for the herbs by outboard motor, not by paddle.

Cali, and the festival

Maura Hermencia Orejuela de Caldas, born in Guapi in 1938, opened Secretos del Mar on the Avenida Roosevelt in Cali in 1968, the first Pacific restaurant run by a woman in the city by Radio Nacional's account: "Los caleños no sabían comer ni camarones ni pescado." She cooked live at the Petronio Álvarez festival from 2013, published Sabor a Maura, sixty recipes, received the Carême prize from the Latin American gastronomy federation in 2018 or 2019 by different accounts, and died in 2025. The Festival de Música del Pacífico Petronio Álvarez, created by Cali in 1997 and held each August, is where the coast's food and music meet the city; Lida Lorena Venté Zúñiga, born in Buenaventura to a Timbiquí family, was named its best cook in 2019 and sells more shrimp empanadas in festival week than in the rest of the year; Luz Mercedes Bazán Arboleda of Guapi brings piangua tamales, fifteen years running; Aura Daisy Rivadeneira, born in Tumaco, forty years in Cali, runs stand twenty with the piangua her mother gathered.

Esmeraldas, the cacao port and the shrimp

The Afro-Ecuadorian communities of Esmeraldas descend, in their own and the press's account, from enslaved Africans and from maroon communities of the northern coast; the historian Francisco Calderón, quoted by Expreso, ties the encocado to the colonial kitchen where African cooking met coconut and seafood. The plantain's arrival with Fray Tomás de Berlanga in 1516 and the coast's turn to wheat bread in 1852 are dates El Universo relays from historians and we did not read them at source. From 1880 to 1920 Ecuador led the world in cacao, exports rising from 372,433 quintales in 1880 to 578,626 in 1899 by an economic history we saw only in summary, and the gran cacao families of Guayaquil, the Aspiazu, Seminario, Morla, Durán Ballén and Rosales, built banks and railways on it. The people who picked it ate plantain, rice and fish, and no source we read connects the boom to a dish. Shrimp farming began in salt flats near Santa Rosa in El Oro in 1968; nearly 180,000 hectares of ponds existed by 1995, Ecuador was the world's first shrimp exporter in 1987, and about 70 per cent of the Gulf of Guayaquil's 159,000 hectares of mangrove were lost between 1969 and 2018, by the environmental organisation Acción Ecológica's count, which is an advocate's. The crab fishers of the gulf, the cangrejeros, hold a working food tradition inside that landscape.

Recognition

Manabí's traditional cooking was declared Ecuador's intangible cultural heritage on 18 October 2018, on a dossier of 142 records from the seven rural parishes of Portoviejo; the cooks who gave the records are not named in the reporting. The encebollado followed on 25 July 2024. In Colombia the National Council of Cultural Heritage gave its favourable concept on viche on 25 and 26 September 2019 at the Teatro Colón, with Lucía Solís, a maker of more than fifty years, saying it carries "más de 300 años" of knowledge; Law 2158 of 2021 declared it the collective heritage of the Black communities of the Pacific, with the right to make it theirs alone.

The Flavour Arsenal

Each entry says who says it.

The herbs of the azotea

Chiyangua, or chillangua, the cilantro cimarrón of the whole coast, the signature of the Cauca and the south, after which Teófila Betancurt named the foundation she started in Guapi in 1994; chirarán, which the Ministry glosses as black basil, one of seven basils the coast uses; poleo, Satureja brownei by the Ministry's note, "indispensable en la preparación de la rellena"; oreganón, the big coarse oregano; thyme, cilantro and the cultivated basil. Bouillon cubes are replacing the bundle, both the Ministry and Sánchez Gutiérrez say; Lorena Tejada, twenty, on the Mayorquín, says the shop guisos are useful beside the herbs, and Angie Arboleda, twenty six, in Llanobajo, says the azotea herbs are not used in the houses any more. That argument is the coast's and we leave it open.

Achiote

Bija, as oil and as paste, for colour and its own flavour; replaced in shops by artificial colour, the Ministry notes, and the cooks warn that seeds left in the frying oil taste bitter. SENA's recipe: 25 grams of seeds to 100 millilitres of oil, warmed slowly, off the heat when the oil turns red, strained; it keeps months.

Coconut, in two milks

In the south, the Ministry says, "la identidad de la cocina se fundamenta en la condimentación con leche de coco". The thick first milk and the thin second milk have each their moment, and the technique is in the ladder. Coconut oil was the frying fat before palm oil, with the oils of corozo and other fruits.

Plantain

Ripe and green, boiled, fried, ground to bala; the small plátano chivo with fish for breakfast in Llanobajo. Green banana, guineo, in the tapao.

Maize

Pacific maize, maíz chocosito, harvested green or dry, aged in water three or four days, broken coarse; for arepas, envueltos, jujú and the pounded arroz de maíz. In Manabí, yellow maize toasted and ground with peanut.

Peanut

Manabí's thickener and condiment: in the viche, in sal prieta, in the sauce beside the corviche.

Taro, chontaduro, pacó and the rest

Papachina, once "comida de pobre", gaining ground as the chontaduro fails to pests; chontaduro itself, sold boiled with salt in Buenaventura, whose disappearance worries the cooks; pacó, the oily yellow aril pounded into soups and rice that replaced meat for the poor; borojó, naidí, breadfruit, nettle, the Tapaje bean sown for Holy Week.

Sea and river

Piangua and its macho, piacuil, clams, caracol, jaiba, the blue land crab, shrimp and the river shrimp munchillá, squid, tollo smoked and boiled to take the smoke off, ray, pargo, corvina, pelada, the ñato of the Buenaventura sancocho, sábalo and bocachico from the river; in the northern Chocó the churuleja gathered only by women in Panguí, the viuda that runs into the river monthly, smoked albacora. In Ecuador, albacore for the encebollado and the viche, nanaó, the sun-dried salted fish of Borbón.

Cured pork and blood

Carne serrana, the nitre-cured pork of the Nariño sierra that comes down to Tumaco for the pusandao, once lamb, once buried in clay; pig blood and intestines for the rellena.

Sal prieta

Peanut and yellow maize toasted apart, ground apart, ground together, with achiote oil or red lard, salt, cumin and coriander, on the stone over the wood fire. Maritza Chica Castañeda of Jama began selling it from a shelter after the 2016 earthquake and calls it "the maximum of tradition".

Viche

The cane spirit of the Black communities, distilled where the cane grows, the first and best run called flor. The base of the botellas curadas with fifteen or twenty herbs and the maker's own knowledge, the tomasecas given in pregnancy and after childbirth, and the newer arrechón, tumbacatre and crema de viche that the festival made popular. The Ministry warns that commerce threatens to trivialise the medicines. No still method is here.

The Technique Ladder

On this coast, as tightly as anywhere, the restaurant techniques are the kitchen techniques, and the kitchen is the women's. Six rungs, each with the mechanism stated and each sourced to the cooks.

Rung 1. The refrito of azotea herbs

"Uno de los pilares de la cocina tradicional del Pacífico," the Ministry says. The herbs are picked the day they are used, washed and chopped, once ground on the stone. Water goes in a paila with the onion, then garlic and achiote, then the other herbs, and oil a little at a time; in the south thick coconut milk replaces the oil when the refrito is for the same day. The Cali recipe book of 2012 gives it by measure: five stems of cebolla larga, four ají dulce, four cloves of garlic, two tablespoons each of chiyangua and chirarán, one each of oregano and poleo, two tablespoons of achiote oil, half a teaspoon of toasted ground cumin, salt, cooked in the achiote oil over medium heat for fifteen minutes.

Why it works: the herbs' oils are released by the fat and the heat, and the slow cook turns a chopped mixture into a paste that carries the seasoning through a whole pot. Without the azotea bundle the coast tastes like anywhere else, which is what the cube does.

Rung 2. The two milks, thin first and thick last

Open the coconuts and grate the flesh, with a piangua shell once and a grater now. Add two cups of water per coconut and squeeze by hand: the first squeeze is the thick milk, the nata; a second squeeze of the same pulp is the thin milk, el claro. The thin milk goes in from the start as the cooking liquid; the thick milk goes in five or ten minutes before serving, or once the protein is cooked. Cook after cook adds the rule: do not cover the pot, "porque se corta la leche de coco". In the northern Chocó the coconut water is the pressing liquid, and the milk boiled until the oil separates gives coconut oil, with the browned residue, the titoté, kept for rice.

Why it works: coconut milk is fat and water in an emulsion; the thin milk cooks the food without the fat, and the thick milk added last brings the fat and the sweetness without the long heat that breaks the emulsion. A covered pot boils harder and the milk splits.

Rung 3. Cover it with a leaf

Tapaos, atollaos and rice dishes are covered while they cook with a bijao leaf, a wild leaf or a plantain leaf, "le dan un sabor especial". Leaves for wrapping tamales are passed over the fire, soasar, to soften them. The pandao is fish or meat wrapped in leaves and cooked in the hearth's ashes, a beach and voyage technique. Hamilton Urrutia, a Pacific cook quoted by Radio Nacional: "El secreto de este plato es taparlo, como su nombre lo dice, con una hoja de plátano o con una tapa." In Borbón, Elizabeth Corozo covers her boiling dried fish with plantain peels "para que la sal salga más rápido", so the salt comes out faster.

Why it works: a leaf lid holds the steam in without sealing the pot hard, so the top layer cooks in vapour that carries the leaf's own scent, and the pot stays below a rolling boil. Corozo's peels are a lid that also draws: the salt leaves the fish into the water faster under the cover.

Rung 4. Wash, salt, smoke, then wash again

Washing is a labour: lime or vinegar for the shellfish, hot water for smoked fish and meat, cold for fresh; the musk is taken off game with boiled water, lime, salt and vinegar, or with the guayaba arazá where there is no lime; chicken is rubbed with grated green plantain in Tumaco to draw the marisco out. Fish and game are smoked on a frame over the hearth or in smokers covered with plantain leaves, or salted and sun dried; smoked tollo is boiled to take the smoke off and skinned before it is cooked. Maize is aged in water three or four days and washed of its fermented smell.

Why it works: smoke and salt take the water out of flesh that the climate would rot in a day; the boil and the wash afterwards take the smoke and the salt back to the level a dish wants, so the preserved thing tastes of itself and not of its preservation. The washing is where the coast's cooking spends its time.

Rung 5. The stone, the pilón and the three grinds

Herbs were ground on the stone before they were chopped. Maize is broken in the pilón, quebrar, and kept in water so it does not darken. Bala is plantain and meat pounded together. Manabí's sal prieta is peanut and maize toasted separately, ground separately, and then ground together on the piedra de moler over the fogón.

Why it works: a stone crushes rather than cuts, so the oils and the starch are released and bound; peanut ground alone goes to butter and maize ground alone goes to flour, and ground together the maize takes up the peanut's oil into a crumb that keeps. Three grinds, not one.

Rung 6. Finish fast

Catalina Caicedo's sancocho for thirty cooks the fish bodies three minutes, the herbs three, the thick milk two, and is turned off. Version B of the encocado adds the thick milk and the herbs "hasta que el pescado haya terminado su punto de cocción, ya que este necesita muy poco tiempo". The plantain and the pot take the time; the fish takes minutes.

Why it works: a thin fillet of pargo or sábalo is cooked at the moment its protein sets, and every minute past that dries it; the broth is made on the heads and the plantain first, so the fish is poached in a finished liquid and lifted when it flakes. The coast's cooks time by the eye.

Part Three

The Ferment and Preserve Bench

1. Sal prieta

Peanuts and yellow maize toasted separately and ground separately, combined and ground to a coarse crumb, mixed with achiote oil or red lard, salted, with cumin and coriander. Maritza Chica Castañeda of Jama: a pound of peanuts, a pound of yellow maize, a tablespoon of salt, a teaspoon of achiote with oil, coriander to taste, a pinch of cumin, on the piedra de moler over the fogón. It keeps, and goes on cheese, plantain, bolón and ceviche. The spelling is sal prieta here, in two words, as Mundo Diners prints it.

2. The sweets of Holy Week

Cabello de ángel, Carmen Sofía Ramos's for six: three green papayas, three panelas, a litre of water, cinnamon and clove, boiled until it is the consistency of melaza and set like a jam, "un dulce de papaya muy conocido en todo el Pacífico sur". Cocadas, Tumaco's sweet: three coconuts, four panelas, a pound of pineapple, cinnamon and clove, a litre of coconut milk, cooked in stages to a thick sweet. Casabe de maíz, Magdalena Núñez Angulo's, which in the Ministry's use is a maize and coconut sweet and not cassava bread. The seven dishes of Holy Week were exchanged with the neighbours.

3. Sancocho de piedra, and the chicken of the forty days

Elizabeth Valencia's sancocho for when there is no animal: potato, white yam, arracacha, plantain, a bundle of herbs tied whole, pimentón, onions, a head of garlic and achiote, thickened at the end with the grated arracacha, "un plato virtuoso" the Ministry says, that has been called both poverty and the cooks' invention. And Rosaura Ruiz's chicken thickened with egg yolks for a woman after childbirth, from the days when forty hens fed forty days of dieta; fading now for the cost of hens and the hospital birth.

Sourcing in Britain

Verified October 2026 from retailer pages, which prove that a thing is sold and nothing more. The coast's own ingredients are mostly not here, and the list is short.

Coconut. Fresh, mature and brown, from any Caribbean, African or Asian shop. The two milks come from one coconut, two cups of warm water and a muslin, and a tin gives one flat milk that will not split and will not fry; use it only if you have said so.

Chiyangua. Culantro, Eryngium foetidum, sold as a plant by Jekka's Herb Farm for £16.50, by Plants Paradise in Hounslow, and as seed by Jungle Seeds UK and Nicky's Nursery; it likes shade and wet, which is the Chocó in a pot. Fresh leaf is sold in Caribbean, Thai and Vietnamese greengrocers as ngò gai, bhandhania or recao, and no shop was checked by name. Coriander is not it.

Oreganón, chirarán, poleo. Oreganón is Cuban oregano, Plectranthus amboinicus, sold in Britain as a houseplant. Chirarán and poleo have no British source we found; a purple basil and a savory are the approximations.

Plantain, yuca, yam. Standard in the Latin, Caribbean and African shops of Elephant and Castle, Seven Sisters, Brixton and Manchester, none checked by name.

Leaves. Lakshmi Stores sells fresh banana leaf by the six; frozen banana leaf is in every Asian shop. Bijao is unobtainable.

Shellfish. Piangua is not sold here; a cockle or a small briny clam is the nearest, untested. Blue land crab is not sold here; brown crab claws stand in. Albacore and warm water prawns are easy.

Peanut and maize. Raw peanuts and dried yellow maize for sal prieta from any South Asian or African grocer.

Cacao. Paccari Chocolate UK sells Ecuadorian Arriba Nacional chocolate made in Ecuador; nibs from a named British importer we did not find.

Viche. No British route of any kind was found.

Where to eat it. No restaurant cooking the Chocó or Esmeraldas was found in Britain. The Latin hubs at Seven Sisters and Elephant and Castle cook the Colombian highlands and the general Latin table. Treat tapao, encocado and piangua as food you make.

Kit. A muslin or a nut milk bag and a blender for the milks. A wide uncovered pot. Banana leaf and string. A stone or a heavy pestle for sal prieta; the spice grinder does the maize and the blender the peanut, and the two together is a judgement. The Big Green Egg smokes a fish over plantain leaves in the way the coast's smokers do, which is our suggestion and no cook's.

The ingredients that decide great from grim, in order. A fresh coconut, pressed twice. Chiyangua. The refrito made that day. A green plantain and not a ripe one. The thick milk added last, off the boil. Salt in the pork, not in the pot.

Voices and Sources

From inside the tradition

• The cooks of the Ministry of Culture's Saberes y Sabores del Pacífico Colombiano, Buenaventura and Tumaco (2016, with Fundación ACUA), whose recipes are theirs and whose life stories the book prints beside them: Julia María Montaño, Mamá Julia; Arminda Sánchez; Catalina Caicedo; Vilma Ramírez; Gladys Prado Churta; Gladys García Riascos; Elizabeth Valencia Caicedo; Rosaura Carolina Ruiz Quiñones; Edilia Mosquera; Ernestina Matilde Ante; Graciela Rentería Viveros; Cándida Cuero Valencia; Lorena Tejada; Luz Nereida Angulo Martínez; Angelita Quiñones; Dolores Ursulina Landázury Cortés; Carmen Sofía Ramos; Magdalena Núñez Angulo; Gladys Ramírez; Ingry Vanessa Chávez Hurtado; Nayibe Giménez; Angie Arboleda; Marcelina Villa Venté; Aura Castillo; Livia Garcés. The book says of itself that its recipes are "una muestra representativa de la cocina del sur del Pacífico, pero no alcanzan a comprender el universo culinario de la región."
• The cooks of SENA's Saberes y senderos gastronómicos del Pacífico chocoano (2019): Eurosina Valencia Sanclemente, Florinda Nagles Asprilla, María Nubia Bermúdez Díaz, Fermina Abadía Caizamo, Justiniana Martínez Valencia, Domitila Valencia Sanclemente, Sol María Bermúdez Asprilla. The book was written by a Bogotá research group led by the chef Ricardo Malagón Barbero, and its chef-made plates are interpretation; the cooks' recipes are tradition.
• Enrique Sánchez Gutiérrez, Universidad de Antioquia, "Ver, preguntar y cocinar… y cocinar cantando", 2019.
• Maura Hermencia Orejuela de Caldas (1938 to 2025), Guapi and Cali; Lida Lorena Venté Zúñiga; Luz Mercedes Bazán Arboleda; Aura Daisy Rivadeneira; Cielo Moreno; Florisalba Mosquera Díaz; Elsi María Valencia Rengifo; Zita Emperatriz Copete de Peña of Quibdó, the Ministry's national prize for traditional cooking in 2015, whose book A qué sabe el Chocó we did not read; Teófila Betancurt Caicedo, Fundación Chiyangua, Guapi, whose Desde las azoteas we did not read.
• Olga Mojarrango and Martha Klinger, Muisne; Celia Angulo and Mireya Copete, the Puerto Artesanal Pesquero de Esmeraldas; Elizabeth Corozo and Carlos Obando, Borbón.
• Maritza Chica Castañeda, Jama; Libertad Regalado, on Manabí; Dixon Briones, Portoviejo; Byron Zavala and Gladys Franco, Guayaquil; Jenny Estrada, whose history of the encebollado we have through El Universo.
• Lucía Solís, viche maker of fifty years; Milady Garcés, Destila Patrimonio; Dimas Orjuela, ASOPTVIPCOL.

The chef layer, and the argument about it

Leonor Espinosa, born in Cartago and raised in Cartagena, opened Leo in Bogotá in 2007 and founded Funleo in 2008 with her daughter Laura; her Coquí project in Nuquí, Chocó, was funded by her Basque Culinary World Prize. In May 2022 a social media user alleged she had taken the recipes and knowledge of the Afro-descendant cooks of Nuquí; her reply, in Infobae, called the critics ignorant, said people should be grateful that cooks were making these territories visible, and said the prize money went to a restaurant and greenhouse owned and run by the community, which she said had rejected the accusation. The interview names no Nuquí cook. No Afro-Pacific cook's own view of it reached us. We report all of it and decide none of it. Daniel Mejía's Culto Pacific brought Chocó cooking to Bogotá in 2022, built on coconut milk, the azotea sofrito, plantain and maize; whether he is from the Chocó and whether it is open now, we did not confirm. In Ecuador, Rodrigo Pacheco's Bocavaldivia at Puerto Cayo in Manabí, since 2013, is the coastal reference; Nuema in Quito is the national one and is in the Sierra volume. No Afro-Esmeraldeño restaurant chef was found, and the Papes port women are the restaurant voice of Esmeraldas here.

The gaps, named

Guapi, Timbiquí, López de Micay and Quibdó are thinner than Buenaventura and Tumaco, because the Ministry's companion volume for them was too large for our tools to open. No Indigenous cook of this coast was heard: no Awá, Chachi, Emberá or Wounaan voice, and their food is not here. El Oro and Santa Elena have no cook from inside. Ecuador's own food heritage register, the best source on encocado, tapado and ceviche, refused every read. The marimba, the currulao and the arrullo as music were not researched, and the one sentence on singing is Sánchez Gutiérrez's. The first work of the next pass is the Guapi and Quibdó volume, the Chiyangua foundation's book, the Esmeraldas thesis on African cooking at the Universidad Técnica del Norte, and one Awá source.

Claims we checked and would not make

• That the Chocó is the wettest place on earth. Among the wettest recorded; the figures are the institute's as the press gives them.
• That any Pacific dish traces to a named West African dish. The cooks and the Ministry say the cooking grew from West African traditions, adaptation and the forest, and that its origins are lost in time; bala's likeness to fufu is one scholar's analogy.
• That the tapao was invented by the enslaved or the maroons, as fact; it is Mamá Julia's and Hamilton Urrutia's account. That "cimarrón" in the herb's name is a maroon reference; SENA says so, and the word also means wild.
• That encocado is Colombian or Ecuadorian, or that tapao and tapado are one dish or two.
• That the Valle's pork arroz atollado came from Guapi, or that aborrajados are Pacific. Press and recipe sites only.
• That the Awá or any named people made the pusandao or own the legend of the three princesses. The Ministry calls it Indigenous and names no people.
• That viche's heritage status rests on one act and date, that 10 to 15 per cent of river households live by it, or any still method.
• The Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica's figures for Buenaventura, which reached us as a search summary; the rainfall figures as checked against the institute's tables; Maura de Caldas's prize year.
• That the Pacific ceviche began in brine on sailing ships, or that any ceviche on this coast is wrong beside Peru's or Ecuador's.
• That the Ministry's twenty five cooks speak for the whole Colombian Pacific. The book says they do not.
• That encocado is 200 years old, that peanut and maize have been grown in Manabí for 9,000 years, that corviche was invented by enslaved people, that the encebollado began with Valdivia, that the plantain came in 1516 or wheat bread in 1852. Each is attributed above to who says it and none was read at source.
• That bolón is African, or montubio. Both are claimed, by Fernando Ortiz from Cuba and by Ecuadorian historians.
• That the viche's plantain and peanut dumplings are traditional. Recipe pages only.
• That the cacao boom made a dish. It made Guayaquil rich.
• The shrimp farming and mangrove figures as settled. An advocate's count.
• That Leonor Espinosa did or did not take the recipes of Nuquí's cooks, or does or does not credit them; that Daniel Mejía is from the Chocó or that Culto Pacific is open; that any Ecuadorian chef speaks for Esmeraldas.
• That smoking, plantain by stage, the handling of the piangua or the fermenting of cacao are as any source here describes them for this coast. Not sourced.
• Any game recipe. The Ministry's own footnote forbids the hunting, and its game encocados are not printed here.
• Any British shop as checked, viche as banned or sold in Britain, or an importer of Ecuadorian cacao nibs.
• Anything about the Awá, Chachi, Emberá or Wounaan tables, or about the marimba.

Sources and review

Researched

Researched from 67 sources in the brief

Where this comes from

6 research briefs on file for this volume, researched to the rules on How we research. Published 20 October 2026. Last changed 22 October 2026.

The brief's own account of its sources

Counts by kind (sources actually read, in whole or in substantial part): about 13, all Colombian. Roughly: 3 [CO-state] book-length or institutional texts (Ministry of Culture *Saberes y Sabores del Pacífico Colombiano*, Buenaventura and Tumaco volume, 61 pages read in full extracted text, with recipes and life stories of 25 or more named Afro-Pacific cooks; SENA *Saberes y senderos gastronómicos del Pacífico chocoano*, 2019, read for history, coconut, achiote, ecology and the recipes quoted; URT note on Law 70 and the CNMH Buenaventura page); 1 [CO-academic] (Enrique Sánchez Gutiérrez, "Ver