A rare buyer of exotic and outlandish fruits thinks about where they were brought from, how and on what they grow, how they are harvested. Even less frequently, the question arises of which path (air? Sea? Land?) They traveled before falling into the hands of the buyer. So, the vast majority of overseas fruit lovers are sure that they know where and how bananas grow - in Africa on palm trees. AND
will be wrong.
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Homeland of Bananas
Indeed, many are sure that the birthplace of bananas is Africa. This is not true. In fact, bananas came to the African continent from Southeast Asia, mainly from the tropical and subtropical regions of India and China. In these countries, bananas have long been revered as sacred fruits that restore strength and nourish the mind. The roofs of some ancient Indian pagodas, preserved from those times, have the shape of a banana, that's how much this fruit was respected here.
Further, the banana culture from India and China spread to Asia Minor. And from there it was already transported to Africa by Arab merchants, for whom the waters of the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages represented the same "inland sea" as the Mediterranean Sea used to be for the ancient Greeks and Romans. The same merchants brought bananas to Palestine and Arabia.
It should be said that by the time Portuguese navigators appeared on the western coast of Africa (this was at the beginning of the 15th century), bananas had already “circled” the entire continent from west to east. The Portuguese first tried them in Guinea. Outlandish fruits came to their taste. They made the first import of bananas from Africa to the Canary Islands, and then began to breed them in their colonies in Central and South America.
Here's how interesting it turned out: the countries of Central and South America got the latest banana plantations in the world, and they turned most successfully on their cultivation and sale. Panama, Colombia, Ecuador today supply bananas throughout Europe. As for Russia: if earlier the population ate exclusively Cuban bananas, now now, along with Europeans, it buys mainly fruits from Ecuador.