The vice president of Chilean fruit industry association Fedefruta has received a Guinness World Record for the largest cherry.

The massive cherry belonging to Claudio Vergara Tagle was harvested last season, but he has only recently received the official certificate.

The fruit weighed 23.92 grams, beating the previous 16-year record of a 21.69-gram fruit grown in Italy.

The record-breaking cherry was not grown in Chile's main southern-central production regions. In fact, it came from Patagonia's Chile Chico, more than 5,000 miles (8,000km) south of the capital Santiago. The region is the latest cherry growing areas in the southern hemisphere.

"Today the people of Chile Chico can say that we are the best, that we have the best cherries, the heaviest in the world, the biggest cherries in the world," said Vergara, who is a grower-exporter.

"This means that the cherries have higher dry matter, and are bigger, sweeter and firmer," Vergara previously told CNN.