Heladeria Coromoto - the best ice-cream shop in the world

This provincial one-storeyed yellow house with green barred windows on Avenida 3 street in Merida, Venezuela, does not seem like much, and you might never guess what is inside it from the first sight. However, this is an ice-cream shop, which holds the Guinness record of the most ice-cream flavours in the world. The ice-cream has the largest selection of ice-cream for you to try – over 900 flavors!

Heladeria Coromoto  is the brainchild of a Portuguese emigrant Manuel da Silva Oliveira, who has worked in large ice-cream producing companies for many years, before he finally got tired of the boring standard tastes, and  decided to open his own ice-cream shop in 1980. He wanted to offer a completely different variety of tastes to his visitors. Manuel's first attempt was to manufacture avocado ice cream - and before the product started to have a decent taste, Sr. Oliveira messed up about 50 pounds of ice cream. One can only guess how much raw material it took him to produce the caviar-tasting ice cream. Fortunately, and to the shop's visitors' delight, Manuel's efforts in ice-cream experimentation have paid off handsomely, and today Coromoto is a thriving institution, attracting people from all corners of the world.

Manuel Oliveira managed to come up with ice-cream flavors of avocado, pumpkin, champagne, cheese, squid, mushorooms, hot dog and other incredible tastes. A special pride of the owner is the metallic-colored ice-cream with Viagra, which effects are reinforced even further by honey and bee pollen.  The house special is called Pabellon Criollo, which has the flavors of the traditional Venezuelan meal – beeg, rice, plantain, and black beans. The flavors change according to the season, and there are about 60 flavors offered in the shop at any given time. All the tastes are natural, and should you order a spaghetti-with-cheese ice-cream, you should expect to taste the real spaghetti and cheese.

Gallery: Heladeria Coromoto - the best ice-cream shop in the world