| Dougaldston Spice Estate |
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| Getting around Grenada - Grenada Excursions | ||||
  One of the island's most beguiling destinations for visitors is the Dougaldston Spice Estate, where little has changed since the 1800s. Tours are quiet affairs, with visitors poring over bunches of dried herbs and pods.The long, wooden building, with its vast trays for spice-drying and old, mysterious tools, is a step into the past.
Located just outside of Gouyave, this historic estate is still the primary producer of the island's spices and the place where they are first processed after harvest. If you take this right turn, you will immediately wish you hadn't. The road has seen better decades, and would make an excellent testing ground for industrial strength suspension systems. If you have hired one of our jeeps, please be careful. The road is short, however, and there is every incentive, comfort apart, for going slowly. Some odd trees on the left seem to have lost their bark. No: actually, they were designed that way: they are pimento trees, aka 'allspice', because the berries taste of a mixture of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. And there are bananas galore, leading up to, and then down from, a little bridge.  A boucan is a building with huge drying trays on rails, so that the trays can be pushed under the building if it rains, and both pushed under and locked up at night, for security. What is on the drying trays depends on the time of year: it may be mace, cocoa, cinnamon, pimento, cloves... (But not nutmeg, which is not dried in the direct sun.)Inside the building, you will be led to a table where you will be invited to 'scratch 'n sniff' the leaves of a succession of twigs (warning: you need more than two hands to do justice to all the different leaves) and guess what the different spices are. You will then be told in some detail how the various spices are harvested and processed, and what they are used for. There will almost certainly be some that you do not know. Tonka beans, maybe, and sapote. And there are some impostors: cocoa, hardly a spice, is there, and indeed there is an adjacent building, seldom visited, where cocoa beans used to be processed using steam technology. You will normally find plastic bags containing cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace and bay leaves.
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