ReKing

From pirate haven to ecological hotspot, Cuba's "Treasure Island" is a far-flung gem home to some of the Caribbean's rarest animals.

A pirate hideaway, a one time US colony and a biodiverse hotspot home to endangered crocs, parrots, sharks and turtles, Cuba's Isla de la Juventud is an enigma. The Caribbean nation's largest offshore island lies 60 miles south off the mainland and is a comma-shaped arc of palm and pine trees, citrus groves and marble hills that few visitors ever see. 

In centuries past, real pirates of the Caribbean slipped into the island's coves, with boats bearing illicit booty. Today, visitors come from the port of Batabanó, 56km south of Havana, on a three-hour ferry ride that costs $0.50 Cuban Pesos (£0.35) and requires reserving a month in advance, or securing a seat on irregular flights. 

Those who make the journey usually come to dive off the south-western tip, Punta Francés, staying at the island's one hotel. Or, they tour the island's panopticon prison, Presidio Modelo (now an eerie museum), where Cuba's late Communist leader Fidel Castro was incarcerated in 1953 for attacking army barracks – an event that triggered the 1959 Cuban Revolution. But beyond its few attractions, the island's sugar-soft beaches, unique culture and history, and protected wildlife havens offer a vastly different Cuban experience than the crumbling colonial facades and raucous rum bars of Havana.

When Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic for a second time in 1493, he dropped anchor close to the island that would later prove to be the perfect refuge for pirates. From the 1850s, Francis Drake, Henry Morgan and their ilk ransacked the Spanish Crown's treasure fleet as ships, bulging with gems, silver and spices, sailed past La Isla enroute from the tip of South America to Havana. Because of this, La Isla was dubbed both "Island of Pirates" and "Treasure Island". It was even thought to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's classic book, Treasure Island. 

In the late 1970s, Fidel Castro opened dozens of universities on the island for foreign students, and in 1978, the island was renamed Isla de la Juventud (Isle of Youth) from Isla de Pinos (Isle of Pines). The schools closed in the late 1990s, but their legacy remains in the island's name.

Back when Columbus' caravel sought wood and water on the island, his men glimpsed no other human soul. Ship logs reveal the sea was "covered" with so many turtles of "vast bigness", the air thick with an "abundance" of birds and "immense swarms of butterflies… darkened the air". 

Columbus would still recognise much of the remote southern third of the island today: a landscape patchworked with swamps, mangroves, beaches, coral seas, limestone forests and caves painted with prehistoric drawings, all safeguarded in the 1,455sq km region called South of the Isle of Youth Protected Area of Managed Resources (APRM). Within the APRM's marine protected area, other vulnerable creatures such as Antillean manatee, hammerheads, elkhorn coral and marine turtles seek sanctuary in the sea.

To enter the protected area, travellers must first obtain permission from the agency Ecotur or a local B&B and pass a checkpoint at the northern limit so officials can monitor the trafficking of wildlife, people and drugs. Three times a week, a bare bones bus jangles three hours south from the island's capital, Nueva Gerona, through forest rooted in limestone karst. Within its tangled embrace is Ciénaga de Lanier (Lanier swamp), refuge of the critically endangered Cuban crocodile. The elusive crocs were almost wiped out in the 20th Century by fire, drought and hunting. A few specimens were discovered in 1977 and a reintroduction programme launched in 1987. 

"We know American crocodiles and the introduced spectacled caiman are there, but in the last two expeditions, our experts haven't seen Cuban crocodiles in the wild," said Yanet Forneiro Martín Viaña,senior conservation specialist for Flora y Fauna, which manages the island's southern APRM zone. 

Forneiro Martín-Viaña is confident though. "We continue to search for [Cuban crocodiles] and reintroduce more individuals into the swamp," she said. "We know this area has great potential for the habitat of this species." 

The coarse sand of Guanal Beach, on the south coast, is veined with beach morning glory vine. Trails of the stabilising plant erupted to replace 10km of casuarina, an invasive feathery-leaved Southeast Asian tree that Flora y Fauna cut down over a 10 year period and recycled, converting the slain trunks into charcoal for export.

Across more than 1km of beach, long, lean sticks poked out of the burning-hot sand, marking a veritable "X" for treasure   yet, not the glittery kind, but a natural bounty. Empty water bottles, placed upside down on the sticks, were stuffed with paper notes indicating turtle nest sites, the dates eggs were laid and the expected hatching dates. Some 250 nests of endangered green turtles at Guanal are under guard this year. 

According to Dr Julia Azanza Ricardo, a turtle expert and professor at the Higher Institute of Technologies and Applied Sciences of the University of Havana, Guanal is one of the most important nesting areas in Cuba. However, climate change is threatening their future. Turtle gender is linked to the temperature of the nest during incubation, and the rising temperatures are resulting in fewer males being born. 

"More than 90% of turtles born in Cuba are female, Azanza said. "In a short time, we expect to reach 100%. When we started monitoring nest temperature 15 years ago, they were 28, 29, 30 degrees. Now it's 32, 33, 34. It will only take a rise of two degrees to reach 100%. If all males are wiped out, then it's the end of local populations and then the end of the species."

Solutions, Azanza explained, include vegetation shading by planting certain species of bushes, moving nests to cooler spots or watering the sand.

West of turtle country and 86km south-west of Nueva Gerona is the village of Cocodrilo, the most remote inhabited spot in Cuba. Founded as Jacksonville after English-speaking Cayman Islanders settled it in the early 20th Century, 122 families now live in single storey concrete and wooden homes facing the sea. Twenty-four-hour electricity only arrived in 2001. 

Here, conservationist Reinaldo Borrego Hernández, known as "Nene", runs a tourism and conservation project, Consytur, with his wife, Yemmy. Nene's mission is to preserve and protect the coral reef, wildlife and nature of his home village. 

"I've lived in this natural environment all my life, and my wish to protect it is in my blood," said Nene. 

By staying in Nene's B&B, Villa Arrecife (one of only three B&Bs in Cocodrilo), visitors help fund conservation work focused on collecting rubbish from beaches and the seabed, capturing lionfish – an invasive species – and serving it to guests, and growing and planting new branches of critically endangered staghorn coral.

"Lionfish get into the mangroves, seagrass and the reef, and have very few predators," said Nene, who has a Masters degree in coastal management. "They compete with local species to eat small fish and crustaceans, so capturing them limits their numbers." 

One morning at Americana Beach, a few kilometres west from Cocodrilo, we filled a net bag with 8 10kg of plastic bottles, flip flops and take-away containers from the beach. Later, we dived 15m down through crystal-clear water. We swam over coloured fans, moray eel, monochrome spotted drum, yellow French grunt and iridescent princess parrotfish before touching down on the seabed amid a large rocky field of multi-branched staghorn coral, grown by Nene these last few years. 

We picked fragments of pale orange coral, the width of a fat ballpoint pen, from the seabed. Nene hacked off blackened ends, dead from disease or microalgae. We wrapped thread around them before diving up to a special "tree" structure to tie the fragments to its long-limbed branches. 

Nene explained that each fragment is asexual and produces a polyp that forms another polyp, and so on. At one year old, the coral reproduces sexually and their planula float to the seabed and the cycle of producing polyps begins again. After a year, Nene will search for a rocky spot with no macroalgae and few predators and plant the new-growth coral. Overfishing has left the reef bereft of much of its previous fish life, Nene said, allowing algae to flourish and suffocate the corals.

"We want to increase the number of juvenile fish on the reef, and staghorn coral offers refuge to young fish," Nene said. "By restoring and protecting the reef, we increase the diversity and number of fish." 

Staghorn coral grows about 1cm a year. It's a slow process, but Nene hopes the work he started will outlast him. "My dream is that more people come to stay so that we can include and pay the young people around here. That will incentivise them to care for the sea and the coast," he said. "And they'll be able to continue my work when I'm gone." 

Unlike other islands scattered around the Cuban mainland, the no frills Isle of Youth is relatively undeveloped. Some locals claim the island is abandoned. But within this castaway island, endangered creatures have sought refuge since long before anyone was looking. Natural disasters, invasive species, over-fishing and climate change threaten its delicate ecological footprint. But with help from eco-minded visitors, Cuban scientists and conservationists are setting a benchmark to ensure nature reclaims and thrives in this remote, secluded landscape.

Recently, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism & Antiquity has launched the Holy Family Trail, stringing together some 25 stops along the celebrated route of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

The approach to Egypt's Church of the Blessed Virgin atop Jabal al-Tayr (the Mountain of Birds), roughly 250km south of Cairo, once involved a perilous, vertical climb up a cliff rising straight from the Nile followed by a series of steep, rock-hewn steps. The handful of explorers to scale the mountain were intrigued by its mystical history. For centuries, the location – its current custodians explained to me – has produced untold miracles, even down to this day.

My recent approach to the church was much smoother – in an air-conditioned car along a well-surfaced road. Heading south along the Nile's east bank past a chiselled, white landscape of quarries dating back to the pharaohs, Coptic Christian graves began to appear as I came closer to Jabal al-Tayr's sacred core: a cave underneath the church. It's here that the Holy Family – Jesus, Mary and Joseph – is thought to have rested after fleeing Bethlehem to escape King Herod's wrath. 

As recorded in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, the king had decreed the death of all Bethlehem's baby boys, but an angel had appeared to Joseph in a dream, telling him to "take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt". According to Matthew, the trio obeyed this instruction and departed the very next night.

According to Coptic Christian tradition, based on alleged holy visions and local lore, the family would spend the next three-and-a-half years on the move, from Bethlehem to Egypt's Nile Delta then tracing the river as far south as Upper Egypt. Marked with many dozens of miracles, their momentous, round-trip journey racked up more than 3,000km.

When I arrived at the Church of the Blessed Virgin, it was ringed by a small iron fence like a prized museum display and its walls were freshly plastered.

Hoping to bolster "spiritual tourism" and spotlight the country's Christian claim to fame, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism & Antiquity has launched the Holy Family Trail, which maps out some 25 stops along the celebrated route and comprises some of the country's oldest houses of worship, of which the Church of the Blessed Virgin – and the sacred cave it was built to contain – is just one. In partnership with the various dioceses and other foundations – it has also been attempting to renovate these holy sites, enhancing them with landscaping, lighting and signage; improving the access roads; and developing accommodations along the route.

With some changes substantial and others merely cosmetic, the Ministry's vision is far from complete. Nevertheless, word of the Holy Family Trail is trickling out. In October 2022, I set out to trace its southward route, starting from the Nile Delta, to Cairo, and then finally into Upper Egypt where the Church of the Blessed Virgin is located.

The Nile Delta

After following Egypt's Mediterranean coast from the city of Rafah to the classical port of Pelusium, the Holy Family's route cuts south towards Cairo through the ancient city of Bubastis. Here, according to Coptic Christian lore, the baby Jesus' arrival caused the temples' foundations to shake, echoing what Isaiah prophesised in the Old Testament when he said, "The idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence."

When fleeing from the locals' fury, Jesus then caused a spring to burst forth to quench the trio's thirst. A well believed to have been built on the site of the spring is now ringed with a fence to keep pilgrims from drinking its water.

The family received a warmer welcome on the outskirts of modern Cairo in Mostorod, a town now swallowed by the city's sprawl. I stopped at the 12th-Century church that was built to enclose al-Mahamah (the place of bathing), another well from which the family is thought to have drunk and washed. It was encircled by worshippers, some writing prayerful notes to be stuffed into a nearby sacred grotto.

The route then swerves to the north before crossing the westernmost fork of the Nile. I caught up with the family's trail on the fringes of the desert in Wadi El Natrun, a valley where Jesus called forth yet another miraculous spring. Beginning in the early 4th Century, thousands of aspiring hermits would settle along its length. At three of the four surviving monasteries, renovations are now complete, including the careful uncovering of Al-Sourian monastery's stunning medieval frescoes of Jesus' life. 

Cairo

After fanning the Delta, the trail circles back to the outskirts of Cairo at Shagaret Maryam (Mary's Tree), a twisted old sycamore said to have offered the Holy Family shade. Entering the complex containing the tree, I found another well from which the family is thought to have drunk, freshly coated in plaster, just steps from an inaugural plaque that was installed within the last week. Further along, the old trunk stood propped by supports beside a low picket fence erected to guard against pilgrims' temptation to peel its bark or pluck its leaves as souvenirs.

In historical Coptic Cairo, I walked around the corner from Roman Babylon's Hanging Church to the 4th-Century Church of Abu Serga, built over the family's next major stop. The church encloses a sacred cave, which is thought to be among the family's longest-serving places of rest and is among the trail's holiest stations. The site is neatly labelled in Arabic and English for the crowds that bottleneck at the narrow set of stairs leading down to the crypt where the family resided for three months.

The family's last Cairo stop was in today's leafy suburban district of Maadi. Here, they are thought to have used the same steps that connect the Church of the Virgin Mary to the Nile, where they boarded a papyrus boat and sailed toward the ancient city of Memphis and Al-Bahnasa, the latter the site of another future monastic hub. When I stopped by the church, the old steps were barred by a locked iron gate, and a police boat docked nearby. Inside, along with icons of the Holy Family, is a glass-encased relic from a much later date: a water-worn Bible plucked from the Nile near the sacred steps in 1976, its pages miraculously open to Isaiah 19:25: "Blessed be Egypt my people… "

Hours later, I was speeding to the south on a train from Cairo's Ramses Station, unaware that from here on out I wouldn't be travelling alone.

Upper Egypt 

At the junction of Lower and Upper Egypt, the Holy Family finally reached Jabal al-Tayr and the Church of the Blessed Virgin. Security concerns and long closures in the surrounding region have seen it scrubbed from the map since the 1990s, with tourists most often whisked past it on trains between Luxor and Cairo. Now open for a decade, this stretch of the Nile south of Cairo has been dubbed a key focus area for those developing the Holy Family Trail, with hopes that its slew of historical churches will add to the allure of its magnificent but little-visited temples and tombs.

Upon stepping off the train, it was clear that old security concerns have yet to fully fade. In line with the protocol for all foreign guests, police would insist on keeping me company for the remainder of the route through the governorates of Minya and Asyut.

Just steps from the new Holy Family Hotel, I slipped off my shoes to enter the Church of the Blessed Virgin, where the enormous, rough-hewn pillars of the nave appeared quite a bit older than the basilica-style church. From somewhere behind the church's iconostasis (the ornate wooden screen separating the church's sanctuary from its nave) came the sharp buzz of sandblasters, a cloud of fine dust seeping through the small cracks and rising to the ceiling. Renovations here, it appeared, were not quite complete.

Beneath the last stretch of scaffolding still to be taken down, I sat on a stone bench in the corner, watching the ebb and flow of pilgrims as they entered the church in noisy bursts, most having just stepped off tour buses parked in the new lot outside. When passing the altar, almost everyone paused to touch or kiss the curtain draped over its doorway, the haze of dust that now filled the nave only adding to the sanctuary's spirit of mystery. Before leaving, almost everyone bowed at the tiny cave where Jesus and Mary took shelter.

I peered into the tiny cave myself, less adorned than expected and even smaller than most I'd yet seen. At the back stood an icon of Mary and Jesus propped on a small wooden stand; beside it was a large metal padlocked box with a slot for pilgrims to submit their offerings.

From this humble setting, the chief engineer on the site would explain, a great many "miracles" have occurred over the years – from healings and heavenly visions to the answering of all manner of appeals: for pregnancies, promotions or even the curbing of nagging doubts that miracles indeed occur at all.

After leaving the cave at Jabal al-Tayr, the Holy Family crossed the Nile and continued southward. They eventually reached ancient Hermopolis, now a vast field of rubble encircled by the scruffy town of Al-Ashmonein. Jesus' miracles here, including the toppling of more temples, are described in the oldest surviving text on the family's flight, A History of the Monks in Egypt, an anonymous account of the 4th-Century travels of trailblazing pilgrims. 

Hugging the desert's edge, the family soon arrived at the slopes of Mount Qusqam, their most hallowed stop. It was here that at last an angel told Joseph that Herod was dead and that it was safe to return North. The holy ground here is encircled by a fortress-like monastery known as Al-Muharraq. Considered a "Second Bethlehem" by Coptic Christians, the site is believed to have hosted the family for six months, far longer than any other stop on the route. 

Past the monastery's giant gates, a monk led me straight to Al-Muharraq's oldest church. Inside, he pointed at a patch of the carpet beside the iconostasis and explained that a miraculous well from which Jesus once drank had stood on this spot. "We usually say that it ran out of water, but in truth it was buried", purportedly to stop its flow of miracles. Such miracles, however, the monk went on, continue to occur to this day.

At the turn of the 5th Century, it was here at Al-Muharraq that Theophilus, Alexandria's 23rd pope, first fleshed out an actual route, which he claimed to have received from the Virgin Mary in a vision. Over the centuries, further stops were added based on miraculous accounts. About 50km to the south, the Monastery of Saint Mary at Drunka is now widely considered the route's final stop and is listed as such on the Ministry's map of the route.

For the drive to Drunka, I tagged along with the required police detachment. The monastery complex here was the largest I'd seen along the entire route, stretching up a mountain near the city of Asyut with plenty of new construction underway. Speaking excitedly of various modern-day miracles, a young nun led the way to Drunka's sacred caves, explaining that one had housed Joseph and the other the Virgin Mary and Jesus. She explained, while pointing into Joseph's cave, that in 1986 the Virgin appeared right here "to confirm to us the truth" of the Coptic Christian tradition's claims.

Like the line between chronicled history and myth, the exactness of the route is certainly murky. Even the Ministry's announcements have varied regarding the stops, their number and even their order, reflecting the challenge of dealing with multiple accounts from so many centuries past.

One thing that's for certain is that the Holy Family's story continues to intrigue and inspire. And now, the sacred sites that dot their celebrated route are easier to visit, thanks in part to broad-based efforts to develop the Holy Family Trail. As for whether the Ministry's vision will be fulfilled, that remains to be seen: the trail has yet to lure the desired busloads of visitors from abroad. In Egypt, however, the efforts have bolstered local pride, illuminating one of the country's oldest, most cherished traditions – one that viscerally links the "miracles" of scripture to the Nile.

Known as "torfbæir", these ingeniously designed homes helped settle one of Europe's least-hospitable environments.

With its lonely lava fields, sheer bluffs and stark boulder-strewn plains, Iceland is one of Europe's most barren countries. Across much of the island, the utter remoteness is striking, and that's especially true in the far-flung Northwestern Region, where I had come to learn about how Icelanders were able to settle one of the least hospitable and most volcanically active places on Earth. 

Settling Iceland, even for the hardened Norse, was tough back in the 9th Century CE. There were sub-zero temperatures and thick snow cover even on lower-lying ground throughout much of the year. The predominantly rocky nation never yielded the fecund land other European nations did: just one-fifth of it, mostly in the Northwestern Region, is cultivatable to this day. When Norse sailors first spotted the island, Iceland was roughly 30% forested, a low coverage compared to elsewhere in Scandinavia at the time. With limited timber, materials for building houses were hard to come by, especially since the island's basalt rocks were difficult to hew. 

All things considered, it's surprising Iceland's settlers even survived. That they did can be attributed to one factor above others: torfbæir (turf houses), which were used for shelter since the days of the first Nordic settlers until the late 20th Century. These dwellings were built around basic timber frames, with blocks cut out of turf (grass and the soil up to 1m thick) arranged over a base layer of rock and packed in to form the structure's walls and roofs. Today, they can still be found across the country, sticking out of the landscape grass-side up like tussocky tents. There are especially good examples open to the public at Glaumbær in the north-west, Laufás in the north and Keldur in the south.

As I arrived at Glaumbær Farm & Museum in the northern fjord of Skagafjordur, the golden evening light tinged the homes' grassy rooftops. Built and enlarged over the 18th and 19th Centuries, and used as a priest's house as well as a farmhouse, Glaumbær is Iceland's most extensive and intact group of turf buildings. The main complex's 13 buildings were huddled together like turf terraced housing, the walls of one touching those of the next. There is a front row of six buildings, each sporting a narrow yellow-and-white-painted wood facade, and a passageway connecting the remaining seven structures leads to the living quarters at the back of the complex. Apart from the painted fronts, each structure's exterior – from the steeply pitched roofs to the walls – is made of turf.

I was being shown around by renowned Icelandic turf house expert Sigridur Sigurdadottir, museum director Berglind Thorsteinsdottir and Helgi Sigurdson, a turf house builder specialising in restoring old turf buildings. Though these homes are synonymous with Iceland's rural idyll, life here, each stressed, was difficult and carved out of precious little. 

They invited me to imagine travelling in the freezing cold centuries ago and needing to urgently erect shelter without much timber or workable stone. Driftwood was possibly available on shores several miles away; otherwise, you could build only with what you carried in or cut from the bare ground beneath your feet. 

"We had nothing else," Sigurdson told me, wryly. "Turf was all that stood between our ancestors and perishing! It was also what settlers knew: they came from places already accustomed to building with this material."

She explained that there is a history of building turf dwellings in similar latitudes as Iceland's – notably in northern Norway's Sámi settlements, on the Faroe Islands, in Greenland and Newfoundland, and even as far south as Scotland's Outer Hebrides. But Iceland's stand out from these for a number of reasons: they were in use for a significantly longer period of time, they were used by all classes of people, they served as everything from sheep pens to churches and they are generally better preserved today. 

"For us, it is still a living, breathing history," Thorsteinsdottir said. "My grandfather lived in a turf house; many Icelanders did until well into the 20th Century. The last-known occupancy of a turf house as a home here was 1992, and many are still used as farm outbuildings, so these buildings are part of our recent collective memory." 

Partly as a result of having been used so recently, torfbæir offer unique historical insights into turf house-building techniques and the living conditions of their occupants. That said, many turf dwellings across Iceland have been modified. Where there was no need to maintain them as part of a residence, authorities rebuilt some for tourism purposes, prettifying them rather than faithfully reconstructing them according to original techniques. 

"They are straightforward enough to restore wrongly, but harder to do with historical accuracy," Sigurdson said. "What looks simple to build now was a skilled art, fine-tuned over centuries. There is no manual. When I started restoring these buildings, the only ones who knew how to do it were the local farmers who still had turf building on their lands, so I talked to them to learn techniques."

Sigurdson learned that a seasoned turf house builder would know timing was everything when cutting their turf for house construction. Late summer or early autumn was best, when conditions were neither too wet nor dry, and when roots bound the soil more firmly. 

Building blocks were no uneven lumps, either, but meticulously measured. Torfbæir used two main types of building blocks, both made of packed soil and grass, but shaped differently. Klömbur (clamped building blocks) were angled triangular wedges, with a tapered inward-facing tail stretched across the wall's thickness to knit into the structure and strengthen it. Meanwhile, Glaumbæjarhnausar (Glaumbær blocks), which were rectangular, ran up to 1m across the whole wall's thickness, and when interlaid with strengir (turf strips) made the strongest wall type. As turf continued growing and fusing after placement, structures would become stronger and more weather-resistant over time.

Each structure in a turf building complex was built individually and placed alongside the next, thus cutting costs by sharing walls and increasing the warmth of the innermost structures. These innermost structures would house the living quarters. The Icelandic translation of living quarters, baðstofa or "bath stove", reveals what the key function of these rooms was: providing warmth. From the 9th to the 18th Centuries, these living quarters had no additional heating besides human or animal body heat. They did not need it, as the grass and earth provided insulation from the cold.

"Even with smaller details, they thought of remarkable solutions to the problems posed by the absence of other materials," said Sigurdadottir. "For example, the dark interiors and the smoke in the kitchen helped preserve both foodstuffs and the timber framework. And the windows in the baðstofa: glass was a barely known luxury there until the 1800s, so they stretched sheep stomach and amniotic sacks lining across the frame."

Around the beginning of the 20th Century, philanthropists intervened, bemoaning the impracticality and unsavoury living conditions of turf houses. Timber, stone and then concrete, which were more readily available from the mid-19th Century onwards as overseas trade increased, became more commonly used for construction. Yet, it took time for modern homes to supersede turf. Icelanders liked what they knew, and what they knew had worked well for a long time. Many, moving from torfbæir to these new buildings, actually began complaining of the increased cold. 

"The importance of Icelandic turf houses goes beyond turf – it is also aesthetics, as part of the national heritage," said Hjörleifur Stefánsson, an Icelandic architect who has studied turf houses for several decades. "Turf houses are not rigid: they are living organisms, changing and renewing constantly. They have their own legacy. The designer William Morris, for example, took inspiration in his work from Icelandic turf houses." 

He then showed me pictures of his own turf house, which he is currently building. 

"I want to make the landscape glide into the building," he said, "like the turf houses of old."

On the back patio at Owamni – the Minneapolis, Minnesota, restaurant owned by Sean Sherman and Dana Thompson – the late-evening sun cast my dessert in a natural spotlight. Marigold-coloured agave squash caramel cascaded slowly down the sides of a sunflowerseed cake the colour of sandstone, and a deep red berry sauce shimmered atop a maple chaga cake so earthy in tone, it felt as though it were plucked from the forest floor.

The connection to nature is palpable here, where sweeping views of the Mississippi River, along with curated indigenous plants like prairie dropseed – whose high-protein seeds can be eaten raw or ground into a flour etch themselves into the landscape like a painting.

"We named this restaurant Owamni from the Dakota name OwamniYomni, for the waterfall that used to surround this area," said Thompson, a descendant of the Wahpeton Sisseton and Mdewakanton Dakota tribes. "It was said to be as beautiful as Niagara Falls. Spirit Island was the most sacred of the four islands here, and the Dakota and Anishinaabe communities would take their canoes there for ceremony, and women would come from far away just to give birth there."

Thompson's grandfather, who contributed historical knowledge to the book Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet, an atlas of the Eastern Sioux published in 1994, made it possible for this important piece of indigenous history to live on.

One of Owamni's many strengths is its ability to bridge the past to the present, knowing one can only exist because of the other. You feel this in the dining room, perched on the second floor of two abandoned flour mills, restored after the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and Parks Foundation raised more than $19 million to honour the indigenous history of the area by creating a park with Owamni as its inspiration. It's an investment that has already paid off in powerful ways.

Eating the food here brings with it a profound sense of place difficult to put to words Less than a year after opening in July 2021, Owamni was named 2022's Best New Restaurant in the United States by the James Beard Foundation – whose annual awards recognise exceptional talent in the culinary arts, hospitality, media and the broader food world. The accolade is big deal for any restaurant, but a monumental one when a decolonised menu is on the table. At Owamni, this means never using ingredients introduced to North America after Europeans arrived including cane sugar, wheat, dairy, pork and chicken. Instead, only indigenous ingredients like turkey, bison, walleye, beans, wild rice, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, herbs, maple syrup and blue corn are featured.

Other ingredients – like crickets, acorns and timpsula (or prairie turnip) might be unfamiliar to more mainstream American palates, despite coming from the places we walk, cycle and drive past. But eating the food here brings with it a profound sense of place difficult to put into words.

While I've had sunflower seeds and honey before, I never expected that, with the addition of water, such simple ingredients could become a cake befitting any pastry shop. And though I can only imagine what a molten sunset absorbing a field of pumpkins into its hot, sticky flow would taste like, I feel certain nothing would come closer than the ethereal squash-agave caramel painted on top. It was so addictive I could have eaten an entire bowl of it. But then I wouldn't have had room for the blue corn mush a hazelnut and berry porridge from the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in Colorado. A pool of maple syrup lay in wait at the bottom of the dish, and its sweetness, combined with the tender grit of the corn meal, the crunch of the hazelnuts and soft, tart berries, felt like a hug from my grandma.

And that glistening berry topping on the maple chaga cake? It's a Lakota berry soup called wojape, which Sherman uses as a sauce in both sweet and savoury dishes. As a child, he'd gather buckets full of fresh chokecherries to make it but uses many different berries today.

The food, while beautiful, is so much more than a plate of art. It's a thoughtful entry point for conversations about indigenous history – something inherent to the mission of The Sioux Chef, the company Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef, founded in 2014, and co-owns with Thompson. Their business started with catering and pop-ups and now includes a food truck, the non-profit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS) from which the Indigenous Food Lab, a professional indigenous kitchen and training centre in Minneapolis' Midtown Global Market is based and, of course, Owamni. The wheels are already in motion to replicate the Indigenous Food Lab across the country, with immediate plans for locations in Montana and Alaska, and, eventually, into more than 45 satellite locations across the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South America.

"North America's history begins with indigenous history," Sherman said. "There should be Native American restaurants all over the place."

While he and culinary cohorts like James Beard finalist Crystal Wahpepah, chef Nephi Craig of Café Gozhóó in Arizona, cook and educator Hillel Echo-Hawk and I-Collective co-founder Neftali Duran have long been working to shift the conversations around indigenous food, the cuisine is still just gaining a foothold in the US.

"North America's history begins with indigenous history. There should be Native American restaurants all over the place."
Recognising the limited time they have to capture guests' attention, Owamni brings the past to life with intentional design touches from a map that hangs in the foyer, noting the original indigenous names for the waterways and villages throughout Dakota Territory, to the sunlight-flooded dining room, whose wall of windows gives guests a clear view of the pulsing river below.

At the door, a neon sign reminds you: You Are on Native Land. Thompson asked if I'd like to pose under it for a photo and snapped away on my iPhone. Though she and Sherman know some people still favour trendy food photos over the story behind the food, they're banking on the fact that the more exposure people have to indigenous culture, the more they'll want to learn its history.

But what that history is and isn't makes their work all the more challenging.

"History books were written by the US government," said Sherman. "You always hear how Native Americans died from starvation and disease, but people were intentionally mutilated, murdered and killed brutally.

"When you follow American history, you'll see that from 1800 1900, indigenous people still had [access to] over 80 percent of land [in the US], but by the end of that century, had access to just two percent."

He pointed to a shockingly long list of historical events systematically designed to stamp out indigenous culture, such as the US government's massive slaughtering of buffalo. Before 1800, an estimated 60 million buffalo roamed the land, offering crucial food sources, along with material for shoes and clothing, housing, cooking vessels and medicine. By 1900, after widespread efforts eradicated the buffalo population across the country, only a few hundred animals were left, effectively paralysing the mechanisms that existed for indigenous people to maintain a self-sustaining way of life.

In his cookbook, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman explains that fry bread often the only thing people associate with Native American food – is "a difficult symbol connecting the present to the painful narrative of our history. It originated [nearly 155 years ago] when the US government forced our ancestors from the homelands they farmed, foraged and hunted, and the waters they fished. Displaced and moved to reservations, they lost control of their food and were made to rely on government-issued commodities canned meat, white flour, sugar and lard. Fry bread contributes to high levels of diabetes and obesity that affect nearly one-half of the Native population living on reservations. Obesity and tooth decay did not exist among indigenous people of North America before colonial ingredients were introduced."

Sherman, who grew up on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, says these historical events devastated so much for human beings and their knowledge base, yet no one is talking about it.

"It's not ancient history," he said. "This just happened."

Every culture has its own connection to food, including how it's prepared, grown and consumed. For indigenous people, food sovereignty the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right to define food and agriculture systems – was erased through colonisation. Sherman hopes to put the power back in the hands of the people, because he believes when you control your food, you control your destiny.

"It's not ancient history. This just happened."
In North America, ingredients like the tepary bean, a culturally appropriate food and an important heirloom crop brought back from near extinction by Ramona Farms in Arizona, grow abundantly in areas without a lot of water. And at Owamni, when mixed with salt, sunflower oil, pepita meal and maple syrup, it creates an immensely comforting foundation for the tender tumble of smoked Lake Superior trout (from the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin) piled on top. The fish was remarkable – evoking memories of a snuffed out campfire that left the tiniest trail of smoke lingering in the air, catching you off guard when you walk past.

The duck sausage, served with roasted turnips and a watercress puree, was succulent and elegant, notes of maple whispering on the palate. It was the perfect companion to a bowl of tender and nutty hand-harvested wild rice actually the seed of an aquatic grass – with dried currants and root vegetables.

The natural world was always a connective thread in Sherman's life. Even in the year he spent after high school working as a field surveyor for the US Forest Service, identifying plants and trees in South Dakota's Black Hills National Forest  whose name comes from the Lakota words, Paha Sapa, meaning hills that are black he said memories coded into his DNA began to unlock. 

"We know the names of more Kardashians than we do trees," Sherman said. "Plant knowledge is power. Everything has a purpose. Even poisonous plants, if used correctly, can be medicine."

MEXICAN INSPIRATION
The roasted, skin on sweet potatoes with indigenous chilli crisp served at Owamni are inspired by Sherman's time in Mexico. "There'd be this guy who came around with steamed sweet potatoes he served with chili and lime," he recalled. "His cart whistled as he came down the street. I liked that combo of sweet and spicy. I harvest chillies in my own garden to make this using maple sugar, dried chiles, sunflower oil and salt."

Most of his career was focused on restaurants bussing tables, washing dishes, learning to make pasta, studying wine and, eventually, becoming an executive chef at 29. In 2008, he took a year off from his job rebuilding the restaurant program for a large fitness corporation, and moved to the village of San Pancho in Nayarit, Mexico.

"I saw so many commonalities between the way the indigenous Huichol people in my village were living, and how I grew up, and realised I didn't know much about my Lakota ancestry," he recalled. "I started researching everything I could find, and the more history I learned, the more important this work became. I wanted to open up doors to something that has been very hidden, and I can do that through food. We all have a connection to it as humans, and it's a gateway to understanding other cultures."

While Sherman won the James Beard Awards for Leadership in 2019 and for Best American Cookbook in 2018, this year's best new restaurant honour opens more space for conversations about history, privilege and the continued fight for a seat at the table.

"It's a game changer," he said. "Typically, it's saved for high-end restaurants for very privileged people – European chefs making European foods. Not much diversity has gone into that award, so to stand out in a crowd like that and get the attention we need to pull off what we're doing, is incredible."

"There's a lot of damage in our history, and a lot of healing that needs to be done."

"There's a lot of damage in our history, and a lot of healing that needs to be done, but we have to start somewhere. What we're doing is just a little step into something much larger."

Thompson sees the impact of their work mirrored by the community. "The staff, city, other business owners, Native community, people who come with their roller bag from the airport who didn't make a reservation it's this organism now," she said. "People are truly invested in this existing." 

And while Sherman admits that a restaurant is perhaps one of the worst business plans you can come up with, he also believes one restaurant can change an entire community.

"We're just trying to take as much knowledge from our ancestors and creating spaces to learn – working backwards to start to reclaim it so that we have a true (r)evolution of indigenous foods," he said. "Our restaurant is just showing what's possible, and I think it's proving its point."

Mixed Berry Wojape (makes about 2-4 cups)
Owamni by The Sioux Chef

Ingredients:
1 cup water
1 pinch mineral salt [such as sea salt]
1 cup blackberries
1 cup blueberries
1 cup raspberries
1 cup strawberries, tops removed
2 tablespoons maple syrup

Instructions:

Bring the water to a simmer in a medium saucepan; add the salt and the berries.
Let simmer for 20 to 30 minutes, continuing to stir as the berries break down. Cook to your
desired consistency.
Remove from the heat and stir in the maple syrup. 

France is facing a widespread dearth of Dijon mustard, which news outlets wasted no time in attributing to the war in Ukraine. But the story is a whole lot spicier than that.
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Take a wander down any condiment aisle in France these days, and you'll notice a pervasive absence between la mayo and le ketchup. Since this May, France has faced a widespread dearth of Dijon mustard, leading one French resident to advertise two jars for sale to the tune of €6,000 or about £5,000 (since revealed to be merely in jest). The shortage has incited expats (this author included) to not-at-all-jokingly smuggle squeeze bottles of Maille back into the country from places like the US to get their fix, while author and Paris resident David Lebovitz even resorted to hunting his jars down at a local gardening store, of all places.

While French news outlets wasted no time in attributing the shortage to the war in Ukraine, the real story is a whole lot spicier than that.

Omnipresent on French tables, Dijon mustard, made by combining brown mustard seeds with white wine, is a beloved condiment that provides a counterpoint to rich, hearty dishes thanks to its acidity and heat. It's the perfect accompaniment to a slice of crisp-skinned roast chicken, the ideal way to jazz up a simple ham-and butter sandwich and an essential ingredient in homemade mayonnaise.

That the condiment is so anchored in France's Burgundy region of which Dijon is the capital city is thanks to the historical co-planting of brown mustard seeds with the region's renowned grapevines, a practice introduced by the Ancient Romans to provide the vines with essential nutrients like phosphorous. Monks continued to cultivate mustard in this fashion for centuries, and, in 1752, the link between Dijon and mustard was cemented thanks to Dijon local Jean Naigeon, who married the seeds, not with vinegar, but with verjuice the juice of unripe wine grapes historically used to add a pleasantly sour flavour to recipes in regions inhospitable to citrus.

Dijon mustard stands out from other mustards on the market for its subtle, balanced flavour. Packing more heat than American yellow mustard but less than powerful Chinese mustard or Bavarian senf, it capitalises on the pungency of the mustard seed by marrying it with the pleasant acidity of local Burgundian verjuice or, in most contemporary iterations, white wine.

But the truth is that despite its historical link the to the region, Dijon mustard has been delocalised for quite some time.

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After Burgundian farmers largely abandoned mustard cultivation in favour of higher-paying crops decades ago, moutardiers (mustard makers) began looking further afield for the tiny seed at the root of the condiment that launched 1,000 "Pardon me, sir" jokes. Their mustard seed needs were chiefly met by Canada, which produces about 80% of the world's supply. But this winter, Canadian-grown mustard also dried up, when, after several years of declining production had reduced stores, dry summer weather obliterated the Canadian crop, sending mustard seed prices skyrocketing threefold.

Though the shortage was not caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was exacerbated by it, impacting Dijon mustard makers "indirectly", according to Luc Vandermaesen, CEO of mustard producer Reine de Dijon. Rather than the brown seeds required for Dijon, Ukraine predominantly produces the white variety used in yellow and English mustard. Given the conflict, producers less tied to specific mustard varieties turned to Canada's already meagre supply, intensifying the shortage.

Inadvertently, this all shed new light on the discrepancy between the name "Dijon mustard" and where it's made. After all, unlike Champagne or Roquefort, the "Dijon" in Dijon mustard refers to a specific recipe and not to a geographic region protected by an Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) or Appellation d'Origine Protégée (AOP) designation, which regulate products like wine, cheese and even lentils with an iron fist.

"There are no rules keeping the production of Dijon mustard in [the city of] Dijon," said Sophie Mauriange of the Institut National de l'Origine et de la Qualité (INAO), the governing board that controls the AOC and AOP labels in France. "You can make it anywhere in the world."

And they do. Grey-Poupon, created in Dijon by Maurice Grey and Auguste Poupon in 1866 (and the preferred mustard of American hip-hop artists), has been made in the US since the 1940s. And in 2009, nine years after its purchase by Unilever, France's biggest Dijon producer, Amora-Maille (which makes Maille mustard), closed its Dijon factory, moving production to the nearby commune of Chevigny-Saint-Sauveur. 

"As far as we know," said Mauriange, "there is almost no production of mustard in Dijon itself, save a very small amount at [La Moutarderie] Fallot's Dijon shop." (The artisanal producer has long made the bulk of its mustard at its factory in the nearby town of Beaune, where it was founded in 1840, and only opened its Dijon boutique, complete with a small, on-site workshop, in 2014.)

The truth is that while Dijon is in the mustard's name, the product is – and always has been – rooted in the city's surrounding countryside, where mustard production flourished in the decades that followed the condiment's 1752 invention. Charcoal producers would sow mustard seeds in fields filled with coal residue, a natural fertiliser, and the resulting seeds, explained Marc Désarménien, CEO and third generation head of La Moutarderie Fallot, were sold to master moutardiers in Dijon or Beaune.

"They had organised into a cooperative, at the time," Désarménen said of the local master moutardiers, of which there were already 33 in the early 19th Century. "So, there was what I would call a fairly powerful, fairly strong mustard industry."

The decline of truly local mustard nevertheless began nearly a century ago: when Désarménien's grandfather purchased Fallot in 1928, he relied on "French mustard seeds, but not only", said Désarménien. "He needed to source seeds in other French regions and in other European countries in order to have a stable, high-quality product."

After World War Two, Burgundian farmers turned their back on the little mustard seed in favour of producing other crops, notably rapeseed for cooking oil and animal feed, which garnered them better pay thanks to government subsidies. By the 1980s, Mauriange said, "almost all mustard production was made with seeds imported from Canada."

The Association des Producteurs de Graines de Moutarde, an association of mustard growers founded in 1997, couldn't have existed even a decade earlier, when low demand for local seeds meant that production of Burgundian mustard had, according to its head Laure Ohleyer, "practically disappeared". But Burgundian mustard seeds began to experience a quiet renaissance in the '90s, thanks in large part to Unilever.

"They wanted to re-localise production," Ohleyer said of Amora-Maille's parent company. "And that's how it all began."

In recent years, thanks to demand from mustard producers, Burgundian farmers grew some 5,000 tons of mustard seeds annually – a portion of which have had an even more illustrious destiny than simple Dijon mustard.

As French producers of Camembert learned in the '80s, it's nearly impossible to protect a product's geographic origin retroactively. But in the early 2000s, some mustard producers sought to take better advantage of the newly blossoming mustard seed industry and rekindle the notion of tying it to the local terroir. In 2009, they established an Indication Géographique Protégée (IGP) a protected label similar to the AOP, but with fewer constraints. And while Dijon certainly gets more name recognition, it is this IGP called Moutarde de Bourgogne that actually means something: that the mustard is made in the Burgundy region with Burgundian seeds and Burgundian wine.

The IGP endeavour was spearheaded in large part by La Moutarderie Fallot's Désarménien, who Mauriange cited as "the most active in the request for recognition of the IGP". Indeed, of the five large mustard producers sourcing their mustard seeds from the mustard growers' association, Fallot is the only one that is making the entirety of its mustard within the IGP.

While Dijon certainly gets more name recognition, it is this IGP – called Moutarde de Bourgogne   that actually means something.For Désarménien, localising production was essential to maintaining the values of his artisanal business, which still stone-grinds its seeds at low temperature to maintain a slightly grainier texture and a fuller flavour. Of course, if Fallot can use exclusively Burgundian seeds, it's in large part because the company is far smaller than the four other mustard producers (Amora-Maille, Reine de Dijon, Européenne des Condiments and Charbonneaux Brabant) sourcing at least some of their seeds from the association's producers. 

The four others, Désarménien said, are responsible for about 80 to 90% of all French Dijon mustard production, with Fallot representing about 5% of the total local mustard market. Reine de Dijon's Vandermaesen said that less than 1% of his production is currently in the IGP, in part due to the price of the Burgundian white wine required. "But [this percentage] is growing," he said.

Of late, climate change and resulting infestations of mustard-loving meligethes (a type of pollen beetle) have halted and even reversed – the growth of the local mustard market. And while pesticides were long the first line of defence, widespread insecticide resistance – not to mention the European Union's increasing stringency regarding chemical pesticides  has made it more difficult for growers to control these types of problems and bounce back.

"Until now, industrial producers were buying more and more from us each year," Ohleyer said. "But production can't keep up." Despite the demand, she said, Burgundian seeds currently represent only 20-30% of the supply.

For Mauriange, while these issues have certainly caused short term problems for the mustard industry, there may be a silver lining to the recent shortage.

"This project had been facing climate challenges these last few years, which discouraged a lot of farmers," she said, noting, nevertheless, that a rise in prices for seeds following the shortage "has rekindled the dynamic" and encouraged farmers to devote themselves ever more diligently to successful production of this now-scarce crop.

For Désarménien, the answer may indeed be found in the rich history of the region.

"Our ancestors had growing methods that allowed them to limit these eventualities  insects and the like," said Désarménien. "Today, we're more in this mindset: of learning how we can move beyond chemicals to produce crops that may not be organic yet, but that are sustainable, if you like. That's our goal."

While "Dijon mustard" will likely never refer to a truly local product again, Moutarde de Bourgogne seems destined to develop its own reputation: not the connotations of grandeur or luxury Dijon producers have long capitalized on, but rather of sustainability and terroir.

And, if this year's harvest is any indication, the times seem to finally be changing for the little Burgundian mustard seed. Burgundian mustard growers brought in yields 50% higher than last year's, exceeding even the historic precedent set in 2016, French news outlet 20 Minutes reported in late July. As a result, moutardiers expect to be able to restock the condiment shelves this November – just in time to add tangy, spicy flavour to France's most beloved autumnal dishes.