Manuel da Silva Oliveira left Portugal and settled in Merida, a university city nestled at 1,600 meters in the Venezuelan Andes. He learned the ice cream trade at established firms before deciding to open his own shop. Where conventional ice cream makers saw limits, Oliveira saw raw material. The Andean highlands offered fruits, herbs, and ingredients that no European parlor would think to freeze. He began experimenting, and the results ranged from brilliant to bewildering. Avocado worked. Smoked trout worked, somehow. Sardines were divisive. By the time the flavors passed 800, the shop had become less an ice cream parlor and more a culinary laboratory -- a place where the question was never "can we?" but "should we?" The answer, for Oliveira, was always yes.

The 860-flavor list reads like an inventory of a very confused grocery store. Conventional offerings like chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry anchor the menu, but they share space with corn, black beans, beer, rose petals, and spaghetti with cheese. Some flavors are seasonal, tied to whatever produce arrives from the surrounding farms. Others are permanent fixtures -- the garlic ice cream has its loyalists, and the fruit flavors made from Andean varieties unavailable elsewhere draw visitors who want something they cannot get at home. Oliveira reportedly told a journalist that his goal was never strangeness for its own sake; each flavor had to taste good. The test was always whether customers came back for a second scoop. Many did, which is why the shop has survived and thrived for over four decades in a country that has weathered severe economic upheaval.

The Guinness World Record arrived in 1996, when the organization certified Coromoto's 860 flavors as the most offered by any single ice cream parlor on Earth. The record held for fifteen years, giving the shop international press coverage and a steady stream of tourists who arrived in Merida specifically to taste the improbable. In 2011, Matt and Mike Casarez of Migg and Mutts Craft Creamery in Black Hawk, Colorado, broke the record with 985 flavors. Oliveira took the loss in stride. By then, the shop had long since transcended the record itself. Coromoto was a destination, a landmark, and a point of civic pride for Merida. In 2006, Oliveira opened a franchise in Portimao, on the southern coast of Portugal -- a return to his homeland, with his eldest son running the operation. He spent his later years dividing his time between the two countries that shaped him.

Merida is not an obvious place for an ice cream empire. The city sits in a narrow valley between two Andean ridges, the Sierra Nevada de Merida and the Sierra de la Culata, at an altitude where evenings turn cool year-round. But the climate is part of the charm -- the mountain air makes a cold scoop feel less like indulgence and more like necessity, and the agricultural diversity of the surrounding highlands provides ingredients that lowland parlors cannot access. Visitors who come for the Mukumbari cable car, the highest and second longest in the world, or for the hiking trails of Sierra Nevada National Park, inevitably find their way to the small shop on the plaza. The line often stretches out the door, a mix of Venezuelan university students, backpackers consulting dog-eared guidebooks, and families debating whether to risk the pumpkin or play it safe with mango. Inside, the neon sign glows, the freezer cases hum, and 60-odd flavors wait to be sampled, two scoops at a time.