Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon

In the cocoa-boom port of Ilhéus on the Bahia coast around 1925, two stories run together: the Syrian bar-owner Nacib's love for his cinnamon-skinned cook Gabriela, and the town's struggle between the old cocoa colonels and the modernisers who want to open the harbour bar to ocean ships. Amado maps his own city: the bars and cathedral square of Ilhéus, the treacherous sandbar at the harbour mouth, and the cocoa plantations inland whose blood-soaked wealth built the whole coast.

Nacib

Ilhéus (the town)

Part 1

Ilhéus in the 1920s is a raw boom town where cocoa money, backland violence and new ambitions all collide. Amado opens the book on its heat and gossip, the colonels swaggering through streets that are just learning to want cinemas, newspapers and progress.

Part 1

explicit The novel is set in Ilhéus, the real cocoa port on the southern coast of Bahia, Amado's own home town, whose streets, square and seafront frame the whole story.

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Colonel Ramiro Bastos

The cocoa plantations

Part 1

The old colonels, above all Ramiro Bastos, drew their power and their fortunes from the cocoa plantations, land won and held by ambush and hired gun in living memory. The bloody frontier history of the roças is the dark ground beneath the town's new prosperity and its comedy of manners.

Part 1

explicit The cocoa plantations, the roças, inland from Ilhéus are the source of the region's wealth and violence; sited in the real cocoa zone west of the port town.

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