Nixiwakas Songlines

Mango Heart-Seed Maracas

Dried mango seeds and red-stained handles on a wooden bench

Handmade in Costa Rica

Mango
Heart-Seed
Maracas

Each maraca is born from a fallen mango, its seed shaped by hand into a heart. Made slowly, made with love, so that love is what it carries into every ceremony it enters.

How Mango Heart-Seed Maracas are crafted

Every maraca begins on the ground beneath a tree, with a mango left to give itself back to the earth.

Not every mango tree will do — the seed needs size, and a slight widening at one end so the heart shape can emerge from the cut. Fallen mangoes, never picked, are gathered from beneath the chosen tree and soaked in a bucket for three days, until the flesh softens and releases the seed cleanly.

Fallen mangoes gathered from the ground
Mango seeds drying

Each seed then dries for a full week. As the moisture leaves, the shell hardens and darkens, revealing its final weight and colour — only a completely dry seed will hold its shape after cutting and take the glue properly.

The handle and the seed must feel like one object — when you play it, you should not notice where the wood ends and the fruit begins.

A length of hardwood is cut to thirty centimetres, shaped to a two-and-a-half centimetre square, and carved to a point at one end to seat firmly inside the seed. The corners are rounded on a router, brought to shape on the sanding machine, and finished by hand until the grain runs smooth.

Handles at various stages of shaping alongside seeds and a caliper
Two hands holding the two cut seed halves showing the heart shape

The seed is opened with a Japanese handsaw at a precise angle that creates the heart silhouette when the two halves are placed together, the interior brushed clean and the contact surfaces sanded flat.

Twenty to twenty-five small stones go inside each half before it’s glued closed — their number and size give the finished maraca its voice. One half is glued onto the handle, the stones placed inside, and the second half added and rotated a hundred and eighty degrees to complete the heart, secured with an elastic band until dry.

Maracas with elastic bands resting on a railing with green foliage

Evening work with very fine sandpaper brings the handle and seed into one continuous flowing form. It is ready when the hand can no longer feel where one material ends and the other begins.

Close-up of the Nixiwaka hand-crafted brand stamp on the handle

Wood grain meets seed shell without a seam. Each finished maraca is stamped by hand — made slowly, made with love, ready to carry that love into every ceremony it enters.

Find on Etsy Contact directly

Each one is unique.
Each one is ready to ship.

Handmade in small batches in Jacó, Costa Rica. Available on Etsy, with shipping worldwide via Correos de Costa Rica. Every maraca is individually packaged in a custom-made single-piece hinged box.

Nixiwaka brand stamp on the handle Maraca in its shipping box A row of unfinished maracas fanned out on the bench

Custom packaging. Each maraca ships in a single-piece hinged cardboard box, sized exactly to protect the seed during transit. Tracked shipping available on request.