The scientific word for this tropical plant is Ananas Comosus and it originates from the Guarani nanà, which means "aroma, or pleasant everlasting smell" and from "a" which is the generic term designating fruits in the Guarani language. Its fruit, however, was called pineapple by the English because it looked just like a big pine-cone.And so did some Spanish speaking countries who also use the word piña.

Christopher Colombus discovered the fruit in 1493, during his second journey to the West Indies, most probably to Guadeloupe where he first spotted ananas plantations in an Indian village. Later, at their arrival in Brazil the Portuguese discoverers tasted the a-nana and got very fond of it and transformed the Guarani word into an ananás of their own. It is the Portuguese appellation that has been adopted by most European countries.

At the time of Columbus, pineapples were available in subtropical and tropical America, especially along the Orenoque and Parana valleys from where they stemmed, supposedly.

Soon, the pineapple spread to Europe and elsewhere owing to sea-borne trade, sailing to Saint Helen in 1505, China in 1518, and Madagascar in 1548.The Spaniard Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdez was dispatched to the New World by King Ferdinand in 1535, and he sent back a meticulous description of the pineapple. As for the French botanist Jean de Lery, his journey to Brazil in 1555 permitted him to taste an ananas. Still, the French ananas wouldn't appear on the tables of a few priveleged noblemen until the reign of Louis XV, when it was first grown in 1733, in the royal greenhouses. Elsewhere in Europe, the product spread to Germany under the name of ananas, to Italy with a change into ananasso and to Russia under the same name spelled AHAHAC in cyrillic.

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