Local products of St Helena
An essential part to traveling abroad is shopping for local products. Locally produced items and gifts we buy on our travels abroad help extend the experience of visiting St Helena just a little bit longer once we are back home.
Hand-made crafts
Saints are very resourceful and we can turn our hand to almost anything! Our crafts are worked in mainly lace, seeds (from the ‘Thorn' and ‘Casherseed' (Acacia) trees which grows abundantly around the Island), aloe and wood. Art pieces and crafts can be bought from select stores on the Island. St Helena has a long tradition of skilled craftsmen. These include the fine craftsmanship of locals who make aloe crafts from the aloe plant which grows in abundence here. Fine lace and embroidery makers continue to create authentic creations the traditional way.
Carpenters continue today to hand-carve rustic wood crafts and other furniture. The local jewellers are well-known for their skill in crafting fashinable and ethnic jewellery.
We recommend you visit:
The Arts & Crafts Centre
SHAPE Centre
Serena's Gift Shop
Moon Beams
Warren's
Gastronomic delights
Then let's not forget the gastronomic delights that are authentic to St Helena. Its Tungi spirit which is being recognised internationally. Tungi is the name given to a distilled product made on St. Helena from the fruit of the prickly or cactus pear (Opuntica ficus-indica fruit). See tours and find out how to take a tour to the Tungi Distillery in Jamestown.
Bellstone wines are bottled exclusively for the people of Saint Helena Island and its visitors. Named after the Bellstone; an ancient rock that when struck, rings like a bell and legend says, grants a wish.
The islands' organic lamb and mutton, pork and beef is unsurpassed thanks to warm, lush pastures which produce a superb, quite unforgettable flavour.
All this superb local produce is of course supplemented by the wide range of food available in shops, but remember that if you can buy local products, you'll help both the St. Helenian economy and the global environment.
Restaurant menus almost always include exceptional tuna and other local fish such as grouper and wahoo.
St Helena Coffee
In 1839, London coffee merchants Wm Burnie & Co described St Helena coffee as being of "very superior quality and flavour". St Helena coffee grown on the Bamboo Hedge Estate at Sandy Bay won a premier award at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851.
This very exclusive coffee is grown on St Helena. The Green tipped Bourbon Arabica coffee grown on St Helena was introduced to the Island in 1733 having been brought from Yemen.
The seeds were planted at Bamboo Grove in Sandy Bay, and now grow in other areas including Rosemary Gate. Only the red ripe cherry is selected and hand picked before being pulped to remove the cherry skin. The parchment coffee is then fermented in water to remove all traces of mucilage before being washed clean prior to sun drying. When suitably dry the parchment is then hulled to remove the parchment and silver skin, the resultant Green bean is finally size graded prior to roasting.
It owes much of its success to Napoleon Bonaparte, who started a vogue
by praising the coffee during his exile on the island. St. Helena
coffee dropped from sight for more than a century, until David R. Henry
began exporting it again in the early 1990s. Production is low (about
12 tons per year), and once again, demand is high.
St Helena Coffee is rare and is one of the finest coffees on the world market. Crops are grown on several sites, including the Bamboo Hedge Estate Sandy Bay estate used for the 1851 Great Exhibition entry. St. Helena Coffee is available from:
Rosemary Estate Coffee, available from The Coffee shop Leisure Park, Jamestown,St Helena Island
Farm Lodge Country House Hotel, Rosemary Plain, St Helena Island
The STAR supermarket, Jamestown, St Helena Island
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For further information on shopping and opening hours, download our PDF Shopping in Jamestown leaflet.
