Mayagüez Farmer's Market            or               Plaza del Mercado

The Farmer's Market or La Plaza del Mercado is in Mayagüez; Every city has one, but on the western side of the island, the best one is in Mayagüez.  This city is the 5th largest on the island.  In 2010 Central American-Caribbean Games will be held here.  There is much construction and preparation, with many roads being remade, and new athletic facilities being constructed.

I don't see the Plaza on the web, but it's a neat place.  It's not large, one floor in a building with all the tropical fruit you can imagine, and tropical fruit you've never seen.  I lived in New Orleans, when I thought of tropical fruit I thought of bananas, mangoes and pineapples.  I did not know  there are many kinds of banana flavors, and mango flavors.  The states get fruit that are hardy and won't spoil on the way over.  There are many fruit that you'll never see in a US market, simply because it's fragile. 

The area where the Farmer's Market is not the best.  There are homeless people and drunks sitting on the side of the free parking area, but if you park in the street, or in the paid parking area, you can avoid them.

In the plaza are  many stalls, and each both has whatever is in season.  This place is a flea market for fruit.  Prices vary from one both to the next.  I took my son to take photos, and he made an interesting observation: there were no young people.  These markets date back to the days when farmers brought their crops in town, and displayed their goods in the plaza, the town center.  My grandfather was a farmer, and a butcher on weekends.  I remember my father telling me stories of how he helped his dad dress pigs on weekends and take them into town.  My grandfather raised sugar cane, bananas and plantains.

You can get fresh eggs and poultry as well. Choose your live, corn fed chicken, pigeon, turkey or duck and they'll prepare it for you.

You can also get fresh smoothies from any fruit in season.  One of the neat things I learned from living on this island is that all fruit does not ripe at the same time. The island produces fruit year round.  Mangoes, for example, on the western coast,  come in season during the spring in April and in June.  But on other parts of the island, they start earlier or later, so mangoes are available  year round.  This year we had an La Niña year, and the mango trees started flowering early December.  We will see our first mangoes in February.  They usually flower at end of January.

This is Ramonita and her son.  They have stand number 51, and they sell smoothies, dried nuts and fruit.  They chopped up and blended what we wanted.

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