Breadfruit Festival to be held in Chateaubelair

On Saturday, August 19, the North Leeward Tourism Association, in conjunction with the St Vincent Brewery Ltd, will host its 13th Breadfruit Festival, at Mission Corner, Chateaubelair.

This annual event, which is held under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism & Culture, is the longest running breadfruit festival in the region and the North Leeward Tourism Organization has received an international award in recognition of this fact.

The main focus of the festival is “to strengthen and develop our cultural heritage, to share our traditional knowledge around the breadfruit and to encourage Vincentians to make breadfruit a staple on their plates.”

The festival is aiming to encourage visitors to North Leeward to sample a variety of dishes, including breadfruit pie, cake and puddings, breadfruit punch and even breadfruit wine. The festival will also include displays of different varieties of breadfruit and medicinal plants.

The organizers invite all to come to Chateaubelair to enjoy breadfruit with fish, tri-tri and lots of other delicacies, cultural performances and live entertainment.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the early English explorers were loud in their praises of the breadfruit, and its fame, together with several periods of famine in Jamaica between 1780 and 1786, inspired plantation owners in the British West Indies to petition King George III to import seedless breadfruit trees to provide food for their slaves.

There is a record of a plant having been sent from Martinique to the St Vincent Botanic Gardens before 1793. The story of Captain Bligh’s first voyage to Tahiti in 1787, and the loss of his cargo of 1,015 potted breadfruit plants on his disastrous return voyage on the HMS Bounty are well known. He set out again in 1791 on the HMS Providence and delivered five different species, totalling 2,126 plants.