The gold they hid inside chocolate

The 1700s. Hardly a ship left the port of Callao for Cádiz without chocolate in its hold. In the Americas, cacao had been wealth for centuries: the money you could drink.

The story goes

Jesuit priests shipped fine Cuzco chocolate home to Spain, tax-free. Inside each humble brick, the legend says, slept an ounce of gold.

At the customs house, an officer lifted one crate and frowned: too heavy for chocolate. The viceroy himself came down to the port and gave a single order: split one open. The blocks were split, and the metal shone through.

Lima never let the story go. A century later, Ricardo Palma wrote it down in his Tradiciones Peruanas so it wouldn’t be lost.

The part they missed

They trusted chocolate to carry their fortune, because no one questions what cacao is worth. Three centuries later, we still don’t. We just think the fortune was the cacao all along.

Some treasure you can drink.