Old Town Vendor · Coconut Candy
Cocadas
Photo: Deparpor / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Many of Cartagena's cocada sellers, the palenqueras in bright dresses balancing bowls on their heads, walk in from San Basilio de Palenque, a village founded by escaped enslaved Africans and recognized as the first free town in the Americas.
Grated coconut is cooked down with sugar or panela into dense, chewy discs, sometimes tinted pink or flavored with condensed milk. Palenqueras carry them in wide bowls through Cartagena's walled city, selling them one at a time to tourists and locals.
Why it's made this way: Bolívar's Caribbean coastline and the Afro-Colombian community of Palenque, descended from Cartagena's colonial-era enslaved population, built the coconut-candy trade into the city's most visible piece of street food.
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Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries.
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