Walking Holidays in Spain - Frontier Holidays

Liquid Gold, Olive Oil.

The olive harvest in the mountains of Sierra de las Nieves is over for another year, and for many farmers, the future is grim.

The village of El Burgo, just an hour's drive inland from Malaga, nestles in a loop of the Rio Turon, surrounded by the Sierra de las Nieves mountains on all sides, and a contryside made up of a patchwork of olive groves. These are mostly small fields with a few hundred olive trees at a time. Very few now make a living solely from working their land, and the diversity of rotated crops and vegetable plots is almost a thing of the past.

For most of the villagers, the only time dedicated to tending the land is in their spare time away from full time jobs. When harvest comes around, the labour intensive method of collecting olives requires a team of workers. Daily wages are prohibitively high, so families will usually pool their resources and help each other in turn to make sure that all the olives are picked during a two to three month period either side of Christmas.

In general, olive production can be split into two categories that coincide with two very diffeent geographical areas. Olive trees from the richer soils of the plains are often on drip irrigation and produce a good yield yearly. However the quality of the oil tends not to be as high as that produced from olives from mountainous regions. Here the soil quality is not as good, yields are lower, most trees are not irrigated, but the quality of the oil is very high.

Walking around a mountain grove, it is easy to see why maintenance of the olive groves is a labour of love. Often the ground is too precipitous to allow tractor access. All work has to be done manually, from the pruning, spraying of minerals, to the harvesting itself.

Whether you agree with the European Union's subsidies, it is easy to see why small scale farmers grumble. Subsidies are now paid on a per tree basis taking into account the average yields of the last decade. Only trees of a certain age are eligible. Large scale producers get paid a higer average subsidy per tree as their groves tend to be higher yielding, due mainly to drip irrigation.

Why do olive trees need drip irrigation? They don't; traditionally this hardy mediterranean may need some careful care in its early days, but once the roots are established, it can resist summer droughts and winter frosts. Drip irrigation ensures high average yields year in year out.

And here's the crux; the price paid per kilo of harvested olives is the same whether your produce is from the mountains or the plains.

The better quality oil from mountain olives is usually used to bulk up the weaker oil from trees grown on the plains. In many mountainous areas, small producers have formed their own co-operative to try and market their own oil as a high quality product and thus cmmand a higer price from the increasingly discerning customer.

Recent increases in the price of fuel, fertilisers and chemicals mean it is increasingly difficult for small scale farmer to make a profit on his olive grove. These mountains of Andalucia have witnessed the coming and going of civilisations from the dawn of man, and each successive tribe has enjoyed the rich harvests from the ubiquitous oilve. It would be a sad day indeed the mountain olive also becomes part of the local history and a thing of the past.

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