Cacao is older than the pyramids. Older than written language. Older than most of what humans have agreed to call civilization. And some of the earliest evidence of people using it outside the Amazon, where the plant originated, was found about thirty minutes from where I'm sitting in Cartagena.
That fact alone should make this one of the most famous chocolate cities on earth. It isn't. Almost nobody outside a small group of researchers and chocolate makers knows the story. So we want to tell it.
What they found at Puerto Hormiga
In 2024, a team of researchers led by Claire Lanaud and Xavier Argout published a study in Scientific Reports that quietly rewrote part of chocolate's history. They analyzed ceramic residues from nineteen pre-Columbian cultures across South and Central America, looking for two things: methylxanthines (the chemical fingerprint of cacao) and ancient cacao DNA.
In ceramic fragments from a site called Puerto Hormiga, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia roughly thirty minutes from Cartagena, they found both. The samples dated to about 5,000 years ago.
That makes Puerto Hormiga one of the earliest documented sites of cacao use outside the Amazon basin where the plant first grew wild. The same study found early evidence at sites along the Pacific coast of Ecuador and at San Jacinto, also in Colombia. A picture emerged that the standard chocolate history hadn't accounted for: cacao wasn't only moving north from the Amazon into Mesoamerica. It was also moving along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of South America at the same time, in the hands of cultures that have barely been written into the story.
The researchers found something else worth pausing on. The Colombian samples contained traces of Criollo, the fine-flavor variety most chocolate books credit to Mesoamerica as the only ancient cultivar. It was already in Colombia 5,000 years ago. The clean Olmec-to-Maya-to-Europe lineage most of us learned isn't wrong, but it's incomplete. Colombia was part of the story all along.
Cartagena, the port that built and broke the trade
By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, the city now called Cartagena de Indias had become one of the most important ports in the Americas. Founded in 1533, it was a hub for trade leaving the New World, including some of the first commercial shipments of cacao to Europe. Beans came down from the Sierra Nevada and the Magdalena valley, passed through warehouses inside what's now the Centro Histórico, and shipped out in crates.
Our flagship chocolate shop sits on Calle de la FactorÃa, one of the oldest streets in the Walled City. The name itself is a relic of this period. FactorÃa was the Spanish term for the trading posts that processed goods leaving the colonies. Walk that street today and you're walking through what used to be the working machinery of the trade.
What's worth noticing is what didn't happen here. Cartagena exported cacao for centuries without developing a local chocolate craft to match. The beans left. The finished chocolate, refined and sweetened, was made in Europe and sold back to the people on the other end of the trade. The growers, the workers, the city itself rarely tasted what their own cacao had become. That pattern, set five hundred years ago, has been slow to break. Even today, most of Colombia's best cacao still leaves the country as raw beans. The chocolate sold in souvenir shops here is still, mostly, made for somebody else.
Why this matters if you're here
A 5,000-year story is interesting on its own. What makes it useful is that it's still happening. The cacao genetics the 2024 study traced in those Puerto Hormiga ceramics are still in the ground in Colombia. The fine-flavor varieties researchers found in the ancient samples are the same varieties being grown by small farmers across the country right now. If you eat fine Colombian chocolate today, you are, in a literal genetic sense, tasting something that connects to what people on this coast were grinding into ceramic pots before the pyramids were built.
That's the part almost nobody is telling visitors. And it's the reason we built Magno where we did.
Our founder, Naty Nicholls, is a biochemical engineer turned chocolatier. She developed our tasting structure with a historian from the University of Cartagena precisely because the history and the science are inseparable. You can't honestly explain what fine Colombian cacao is without explaining where it came from, who grew it, and why most of the world has been eating something else and calling it chocolate.
If you want to taste the history
Our Cartagena flagship is on Calle de la FactorÃa, in the Centro Histórico. Walk-ins welcome for the shop. Guided tasting experiences are by reservation.
See all chocolate experiences in Cartagena →
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