Golfo Dulce

Watermelon, originally from Africa, came to the American continent with the Spanish and with the Africans who were brought as slaves. In Guatemala, African communities existed in the territory as early as the 17th century. Tomás Gage, a religious Dominican who was in the country around 1630, wrote that the mountains on the road to Golfo Dulce (Sweet Gulf), now known as Lake Izabal, where they kept two or three hundred enslaved people who had escaped from their masters and were known as Cimarrones.