Farming and the plantation

The banana farm is the heart of the crop, and to understand it is to understand a landscape made by hand. The banana plant only thrives where the climate is gentle —below 300 metres, near the coast and sheltered from the wind—, but this fertile land of volcanic origin lacked the essential thing: water. Rainfall here barely reaches 300 millimetres a year, when the crop needs up to four times as much, and the solution came from underground: springs, galleries that run for kilometres into the rock, and wells, with the water carried by channels to every plant. And where there was a hillside, stone walls were raised and terraces levelled to tame the slope, gain ground and hold the soil in place.

It is against that backdrop that the plant's cycle unfolds. A common misunderstanding is worth clearing up: the banana plant is not a tree but a giant herb; what looks like a trunk is the sheaths of its rolled-up leaves. From within it emerges the heart —a purple flower cluster— from which the hands are born and, from each hand, the fingers: the bananas. Twelve to eighteen months pass between planting and cutting. And when the bunch is cut, the plant —which fruits only once— has already left a shoot beside it to take its place: in this way the banana grove keeps producing for decades without replanting.