Set sail on a Spanish chocolate tour

CHOCOLATE. Now, there's a word to bring a smile to your face. Montezuma didn't know what he was starting when he first mixed beans from the cacao plant with hot water and salt and started drinking. Joanne Harris wrote an entire novel about it, which became an entire film about it, starring Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche. Domestic tiffs have been healed by it. Christmas and Easter have become characterised by it. A trip to the cinema wouldn't be the same without it, popcorn or not.

Now imagine an entire holiday themed on chocolate. Costa Cruises, an Italian firm, is set to launch its first ever chocolate-themed tour of the Mediterranean next year, setting off from Civitavecchia near Rome, Genoa on the Italian Riviera, and coming back via Valletta, the capital of Malta (yes, the natives have heard all the jokes about Maltesers, and yes, they do agree it's cannibalism), and Catania in Sicily, stopping en route in Spain, in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca.

On board the 'Chococruise', you'll start by learning to cook cakes, pastries and chocolates in masterclasses given by experts in the field, including chocolatiers Guido Gobino and Pierpaolo Ruta from Italy (Torino and Modica) and Enric Rovira from Barcelona (second picture).

Chocolate-tasting sessions, classes on matching up different types of wines with different types of chocolate – and with typical Mediterranean cuisine – are among some of the delectable activities passengers on the Costa Pacifica can get their teeth into.

You can also dine on entirely cocoa-themed meals combined with cocoa cocktails, and you get a welcome pack on arrival containing chocolate and choc-themed souvenirs.

Part of the route includes a stop-off at Barcelona's chocolate museum, the Museu de la Xocolata.

Spanish chocolate isn't as famous as Belgian, Swiss or British (Cadbury's, Bourneville) or from the US (Hershey's, for example), but it should be. It's every bit as delicious as the first two, which have long been acknowledged to be the world's favourites, so it's no coincidence that Spain has several chocolate museums of its own. Here are a handful anyone with a sweet tooth should seriously consider paying a visit to.

 

Museu de la Xocolata, Barcelona

Privately-owned, in the hands of the Barcelona Bakery Society, the 'MX' is only open on Mondays, but is small enough to offer an intriguing detour and complete enough to be a fascinating insight into the history of this global confectionery.

Based in El Borne in the historic quarters, the Ciutat Vella, you'll find it in the former Sant Agustí Vell Convent and you'll get a tour through time starting from chocolate's origins as a savoury, spicy drink heavily consumed in the Americas as a source of energy, through to the most elaborate and tasty French bonbons.

Founded in the year 2000, the 'MX' offers haute cuisine bakery classes themed on chocolate for children and adults, choc-themed evening meals, activities for schools, and a café offering cakes, chocolates and hot chocolate (which, in Spain, is typically thick enough to stand a spoon up in and is, actually, often eaten with said spoon).

 

Museo de Chocolate Valor, Villajoyosa

Valor chocolate is one of Spain's most iconic brands, and found in almost every supermarket in its most basic format – although for the more sophisticated versions, the factory shop or the few-and-far-between but worth-the-search Cafés Valor (one of these is in Dénia, northern Alicante province, on the central C/ La Vía) offer attractive, decorative, elaborate and delicious creations. But given that it is widely retailed in bars and standard boxes in main grocery chains, almost anyone can access the true privilege of a taste of homemade Spanish chocolate.

The Valor factory and its adjoining museum in Villajoyosa – which translates more or less as 'Happy Town', and no wonder, given that it's the cradle of Mediterranean chocolate production – takes you through the traditional method of manufacture and also the more modern ways developed through more than five generations of the Valor family since the plant was founded in 1881.

A small, cosy museum with short group tours that start with a brief video projection in a town also famed for its multi-coloured fishermen's houses – said to be to guide sailors home at night, so they could pick out their homes as they drew near the harbour – the Valor centre is an ideal detour if you're in Alicante, a city just a few kilometres south of Villajoyosa, or in Benidorm, which is about a 10-minute drive north of the museum.

 

ChocoMuseo Pinto

If you're short of time, this unusual exhibition in the historic and beautiful town of Pinto, just outside Madrid, takes barely an hour to get around, and as well as learning about the origins of cocoa and its transformation into those 100-gram bars tempting us at the supermarket, you'll wander round 10 small displays with a chocolate theme taking their inspiration from film, literature, design, the Mayans, and even the world's best-acclaimed collection of miniature trains which bore posters and brand names of European chocolate empires.

Even though the visit only takes an hour, your visit to the shop afterwards may hold you up for even longer, however.

 

Astorga Chocolate Museum

If you're looking to make a week of it, with Barcelona and Sueca only open on Mondays, you could head north-west to the province of León from Tuesday to Saturday where the museum in the picturesque rural village of Astorga opens from 10.30 to 18.00, or until 19.00 between May and September.

Founded in 1994 as a private initiative, it is one of the few remaining legacies of the massive confectionery industry in the area – as an example, in 1914, Astorga was home to 49 chocolate manufacturers, or roughly one for every 128 members of the population at the time (and would still be enough for one per 228 inhabitants now). And for the last few years, the International Astorga Chocolate Show (Salón Internacional del Chocolate de Astorga, or SICA) has been a huge hit with visitors from all over the planet.

The museum closes for two hours each day from 14.00 to 16.00, or to 16.30 from May to September, and if any of the opening days falls on a bank holiday, you can still get inside between 11.00 and 14.00, except on Christmas Day, New Year's Day and January 6.

 

Chocomundo Estepa

This village in the province of Sevilla houses Spain's largest chocolate museum, and the Chocomundo factory is still trading – in fact, given that residents in Spain travel from as far away as Galicia in the north, an entire day's drive, just to pick up their completed orders in person, the manufacturers and retailers, called La Despensa del Palacio, limit purchases to a kilo per head at Christmas and, at that time of year, the museum even has a waiting list.

With 10 themed sections, as well as the usual 'making of' and 'history of' tour, you can find advertising posters through the ages (hard to believe anyone ever needed to advertise chocolate) and even archaeological gems from the Maya and Aztec settlements in the southern territories of North America.

Consumers queue up outside La Despensa hours before it opens, and children pester to be allowed to visit the museum so they can make their own chocolates using animal-shaped moulds and get a diploma certifying them as 'master chocolatiers'.

 

Comes Chocolate Museum, Sueca

Run by the chocolate manufacturer of the same name, the Comes museum in the Valencia-province coastal town of Sueca takes you through the process of making chocolate from a master craftsman's point of view – crushing and shelling the dried beans by hand using stone mills, and so on – as well as describing the history of chocolate from the time when the Mayans believed, as far back as the year 400 BC, that cocoa beans were Quetzalcóatl, the personification of the god of wisdom, in disguise and used to use them as currency. You'll also hear about how chocolate first arrived in Spain in the 16^th century, following the 'discovery' and colonisation of the Americas, after which the sweet-toothed Europeans mixed it with sugar and it became a popular drink among the upper classes.

Visitors to the Comes museum will be able to see all the original equipment the firm bought in 1870 for chocolate-making, and even peruse a library replete with recipe books, photographic books and decades' worth of chocolate-related literature.

Sueca chocolate is not cheap, but if you ever see a bar of Comes on sale, don't let the price tag put you off just because it involves a slightly larger investment than the average Mars Bar. Its full-flavoured, full-bodied, velvety smoothness is something you'll only ever find in chocolate made using the most traditional methods.

The museum is open on Mondays from 10.30 and can be found at number 29 of the C/ Sant Josep.

 

Change your name to Charlie and go on tour

Other than chocolate museums, Spain has plenty of working factories where visitors can take a tour and join chocolate-making workshops, often in several languages, frequently with shops and cafés attached where you can try and buy their produce. Check out the Mayan Monkey chocolate factory in Mijas (Málaga province) – a name that was chosen, according to owners Eli and Jason, because the Mayans discovered cocoa beans were edible after seeing monkeys ripping them off the plants in their pods and guzzling them whole – which can be found in the Plaza Virgen de la Peña, and whose shop and café is in the Plaza de la Constitución just down from the bullring and not far from the tourist information office. Also in Andalucía is Chocolates Sierra Nevada in the Pitres area and Abuela ili Chocolate in the Pampaneira area, both in Alpujarra (Granada province).