I Tried Cactus Fruit. The Cactus Fought Back.
The story of how simple curiosity led me to a pair of tweezers, a desk lamp, and an unexpected virtual journey into ancient Mexico.
All I wanted was to find out what cactus fruit tasted like. Nothing complicated: buy it, peel it, try it. And everything started out so well…
In Spain, I saw these fruits all the time: bright, oval fruits growing right on those huge green cactus paddles or sitting peacefully in store displays. Here they’re called higos chumbos. I walked past them again and again until one day curiosity finally won: how many times could I look at these things without ever trying one?
Overall, our first encounter was going pretty well — right up until I decided to peel it.
With my bare hands. Yes…
And you know what? It was good. Really good. The flesh was sweet, somewhere between a ripe pear and a watermelon, and inside were dozens of tiny seeds so hard it felt like the cactus had decided, just in case, to protect itself from the inside too. That takes away from the experience a little… but I still liked it.
But… anyone who has ever dealt with a prickly pear is probably snickering at me by now.
Here’s the thing: higo chumbo has one nasty little secret that a beginner might not notice. Besides the obvious spines, which I removed easily enough, the skin is covered in glochids — tiny, almost invisible needles. They’re so small that at first you think everything is fine, and then five minutes later you find them in your fingers, then your palms, then somehow on the backs of your hands, and the whole damn thing itches like crazy. At some point, you seriously start wondering if these things can teleport.
So my first encounter with higo chumbo unexpectedly turned into an intimate tête-à-tête with a pair of tweezers and a desk lamp. Which means I can now offer the first practical tip in this article as someone who paid for this knowledge with her own hands: do not peel a prickly pear with your bare hands. Gloves, tongs, running water — whatever works. Just don’t repeat my experiment.
So what exactly is this higo chumbo?
Once the operation to save my hands was more or less over — or maybe I just got tired of it — I started wondering where this cactus had come from in the first place. In Spain, it looks so completely at home that you could easily mistake it for a Mediterranean native: it grows along roadsides, next to old walls, on dry hillsides and abandoned lots, and generally acts like it owns the place.
That simple question — “What exactly is this plant?” — is where things got really interesting.Oh God, why do I have to be so curious?… Oh well… I started looking for an answer and quickly discovered that my Spanish higo chumbo wasn’t Spanish at all. Its homeland is the Americas. Or, to be more specific… Mexico. And that’s where the story of this ordinary cactus I had seen so many times along Spanish roads and beside abandoned buildings suddenly became much more interesting than I had expected.
In Nahuatl, the fruit was called nōchtli, while the cactus itself was nōpalli, which is where the modern Spanish word nopal comes from. Today in Mexico, the fruit is usually called tuna, which sounds pretty funny to an English speaker: you expect a fish and instead you get a cactus — and a surprisingly well-armed one at that, as I found out firsthand.
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Well, I figured I should probably get to know my delicious enemy a little better.
And that’s when I realized there was much more to it. To me, it was an unfamiliar fruit I had finally decided to try in Spain. But in Mexico, people had been eating and using this plant for centuries. The fruit was eaten fresh and used to make food and drinks, the young fleshy pads were eaten too, and different parts of the plant had practical and medicinal uses.
And its story went far beyond food. The cactus became so deeply rooted in the culture of Central Mexico that it ended up at the center of one of the best-known stories about the founding of Tenochtitlan.
Among the Nahuatl-speaking peoples were the Mexica. They built a state centered on their capital, Tenochtitlan, and became the dominant power in what we commonly call the Aztec Empire today. According to Mexica tradition, their ancestors wandered for years in search of the place where they were meant to settle, waiting for a sign: an eagle perched on a nopal cactus. When they saw it on an island in Lake Texcoco, they founded Tenochtitlan there, and the city eventually grew into a vast capital. Mexico City stands on that site today, but the ancient image never disappeared: the eagle and the nopal are still at the center of Mexico’s coat of arms and flag.
Funny. You start out simply deciding to try an unfamiliar fruit in Spain, and then you discover that in another country this same plant had been so important for centuries that it outlived an empire and remained on the coat of arms of modern Mexico.
So how did nōchtli end up in Spain?
After contact between Europe and the Americas, prickly pear crossed the Atlantic and apparently took one look at the Mediterranean climate and thought, Wow, not bad at all… I like it here. I’ll take it! Actually, make that two.
It adapted beautifully to warm, dry areas, and today you can often see it along Spain’s Mediterranean coast and in the south — beside roads, near old stone walls, in fields, and on abandoned lots. It looks so familiar that it’s easy to forget there was a time when these cacti didn’t grow here at all.
But there’s another interesting twist in the European story of prickly pear. The cactus turned out to be valuable for more than just the plant itself: cochineal, a tiny insect used to produce the famous bright red dye carmine, was raised on it. After the conquest of the Americas, cochineal became a valuable commodity shipped from the New World to Europe, and growing prickly pear for dye production became important in parts of the Mediterranean as well.
That’s one of the things I love about plants: some of them are incredibly good at blending into a new landscape. What are you looking at? I’ve always been here. And a lot of the time, we don’t even realize that the plant in front of us is an introduced, and sometimes invasive, species. We look at a familiar landscape and automatically assume everything in it is “local,” even though plants travel too — with people, ships, trade, colonization, agriculture, and plain old human curiosity. Give them a few generations, and many of them stop looking like newcomers and simply become part of the landscape.
So higo chumbo traveled a pretty long way before becoming a familiar part of Mediterranean Spain: from the American nōchtli, across the Atlantic, to the Spanish higo chumbo, which now feels perfectly at home under the Mediterranean sun.
Would I eat it again? Of course. Yummy!!! It really is delicious. Besides, a little revenge wouldn’t hurt.
Would I peel it with my bare hands again?
Oh, hell no!
Find another fool. I do learn from my mistakes. Sometimes…
Next time I’ll bring gloves. And tongs. Maybe even safety goggles. Things between me and this fruit are serious now, and I know how to defend myself.
Sometimes discovering another culture begins in a museum, at an archaeological site, or in an old book. And sometimes you just buy a fruit you’ve never tried before and unexpectedly discover that behind this little prickly monster is a story that began across the ocean centuries ago.
