Aguacate

 The avocado is a tree native to Mexico and Central America, classified in the flowering plant family Lauraceae along with cinnamon, camphor and bay laurel. Avocado or alligator pear also refers to the fruit, botanically a large berry that contains a single seed.

Avocados are commercially valuable and are cultivated in tropical and Mediterranean climates throughout the world. They have a green-skinned, fleshy body that may be pear-shaped, egg-shaped, or spherical. Commercially, they ripen after harvesting. Trees are partially self-pollinating and often are propagated through grafting to maintain a predictable quality and quantity of the fruit.

History

Persea americana, or the avocado, is believed to have originated in the state of Puebla, Mexico, though fossil evidence suggests that millions of years ago similar species were much more widespread, occurring as far north as California at a time when the climate of that region was more hospitable to them.

The native, undomesticated variety is known as a criollo, and is small, with dark black skin, and contains a large seed. It likely coevolved with extinct megafauna. The oldest evidence of avocado use was found in a cave located in Coxcatlán, Puebla, Mexico, that dates to around 10,000 BC. The avocado tree also has a long history of cultivation in Central and South America; a water jar shaped like an avocado, dating to AD 900, was discovered in the pre-Incan city of Chan Chan. The earliest known written account of the avocado in Europe is that of Martín Fernández de Enciso in 1518 or 1519 in his book, Suma De Geographia Que Trata De Todas Las Partidas Y Provincias Del Mundo. The first written record in English of the use of the word 'avocado' was by Hans Sloane in a 1696 index of Jamaican plants. The plant was introduced to Indonesia in 1750, Brazil in 1809, South Africa and Australia in the late 1800s, and the Levant in 1908.

Etymology

The word "avocado" comes from the Spanish aguacate, which in turn comes from the Nahuatl word āhuacatl, which goes back to the proto-Aztecan pa:wa which also meant "avocado". Sometimes the Nahuatl word was used with the meaning "testicle", probably because of the likeness between the fruit and the bodypart.

In other central-American and Caribbean Spanish-speaking countries it is known by the Mexican name, while Sout

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