Passion fruit (also known as maracuja or granadilla) is the fruit of the Passiflora vine, a type of passion flower (plants of the Passifloraceae family).
The climbing plant is a vine species native to South America, specifically Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. The fruit gets its name from its flower, which comes from one of the hundred species of passion flowers.
Passion fruit is a type of fragrant berry that, when ripe, takes on an oval shape and a bittersweet taste, with a hard outer crust (a purplish peel) and a juicy center rich in aroma and seeds surrounded by a yellow membrane. There are several varieties of this exotic fruit: the color varies from purple to yellow and golden, but there are also hybrids like the variety called Kavery. Being a tropical plant, for better cultivation, it needs well-drained soil or a garden with a high amount of humus and neutral pH to grow. Therefore, it is commercially cultivated in the Nilgiri hills, northeastern areas like Manipur, Mizoram, and Meghalaya in India.
Although it is a tropical plant, some of its varieties can also survive in subtropical climates. For this reason, they are cultivated all over the world, including Asia, Europe, Australia, and South and North America. In Brazil, it is called maracuja, and it is also known by this name in other parts of the world.
