The History of Sisal - Mayan Tale

This blog series follows the captivating story of Agave sisalana and highlights just how diverse the uses of Agave can be and how a single plant species has had such an impact on the global scale.

Come take a journey through the history of arguably one of the world’s most influential plants, from its contribution to the development of ancient civilisations to the plains of Africa, where hundreds of people are involved in processing a valuable commodity and onward to the future of agave spirit production outside of Mexico

What do the great Mayan pyramids, like Chichen Itza pictured here, have to do with Agave?

All Agave are native to Central America, with the highest species diversity in Mexico. The importance of agave to the ancient civilisations in Mexico is clear in the folklore of some Indigenous tribes where there is a goddess of Agave. Most people are aware of the delicious distillate extracted from various Agave species, but often, other uses of the plant are overlooked. If we journey to around 600 A.D, whilst Europe was heading deeper into the Dark Ages, over in Mexico the great Mayan Empire was thriving. During this time there were many pyramids constructed, and vast civilisations developed around these ceremonial structures. The building of these great structures was made possible in large part due to an important material that the Mayans learnt to extract from certain Agave plants. This exceptional material is a strong fibre found in the leaves, extracted by thrashing and then drying out the remaining fibre.

Originating from around the port town of Sisal in the Yucatan peninsula, Agave sisalana is a species that has particularly tough fibres within the sharp and spiny leaves (Sisal is locally known as Henequén and is a descendent of Agave fourcroydes). It is said that the rope made out of twined sisal fibres were used to carry the very stones that were used in constructing the many Mayan pyramids. Sisal was also used to make several different products, including hammocks, netting and paper and clearly played an important role as a commodity for the Mayan people. And this tradition of using natural fabrics still persists today where you’ll often find products manufactured out of sisal in stores across the Yucatan Peninsula.

It was a few hundred years after the collapse of the Mayan Empire, in the early 1800s, that the next chapter in our sisal story begins, and the legend of ‘green gold’ will be told.