MILLENARY OLIVE TREES

MILLENARY OLIVE TREES

If you start talking about the Maestrat, it is obligatory to mention the thousand-year-old olive trees, as they are an essential part of our landscape.

Our region, with more than 4,000 catalogued specimens, has the largest concentration of thousand-year-old olive trees in the world.

The other day, I had the pleasure of accompanying Amador, one of my suppliers in Traiguera, on one of his visits: Bodegas Peset Vallés.

Amador started recovering the ancient olive trees, freeing them from the wild shoots and pruning the dry branches, when he became unemployed after the financial crisis. At the beginning he had little more than 10 trees, but as time went by, he began to lease more land.

Currently, Amador takes care of more than a hundred thousand-year-old olive trees, which is no easy task, but such is his dedication that he has become known in national media such as El País or RTVE, and in international media such as National Geographic, Le Figaro Magazine, CNN, Travelife, FAO, TF1.

The large size of the ancient olive trees means that all the work has to be done by hand, such as pruning, fertilising and harvesting. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that, despite its large size, a thousand-year-old olive tree does not produce a larger quantity of olives than a younger one, but on the contrary, it tends to produce every two years and rest every one.

The reader may ask: If everything has to be done by hand and production is so low, why not uproot and plant other varieties that are more productive?

It must be said that we have seen it all. In February 1956, the entry of a cold front that caused temperatures to drop below normal caused the death of many trees. Later, it became fashionable to uproot entire farms of large olive trees to sell them all over the world, but fortunately, for some years now, there has been a law to protect them. Moreover, the common sense of many farmers meant that not all of them were uprooted, and so we can still see many thousand-year-old olive trees in our area.

For me, it is clear that they are as firmly rooted in this region as they are in the culture, and they must therefore be cherished and cared for as a natural heritage.

It is very difficult to know the exact age of each olive tree. This is because after a certain age the trunk begins to open up, allowing water to enter and the humidity causes part of the trunk to rot, leaving an empty space in the middle. 

According to the regulations, an olive tree is classified as thousand years old if the perimeter of the trunk exceeds 3.50 m at a height of 1.30 m from the ground.

One of them is located on an orchard that Amador looks after, it was recently awarded the title of being the most monumental olive tree in the whole of the Mediterranean: the Sinfo olive tree.

It is quite a spectacle of an olive tree. It has a hollow in the middle of the trunk that could hold 4 or 5 people.

The Sinfo olive tree is not a solitary millenary tree: there are several other specimens on the estate.

All this is a guarantee that the oil that Amador bottles for us comes 100% from his "godchildren": the thousand-year-old olive trees.

We can taste his oils in the bottling plant, that has also been restored by Amador. And beside the millenary oil, he can offer us a wide range of flavoured oils, but I will tell you more about this in another article.

I leave you to enjoy the photos I took of Sinfo's olive tree.

See you soon at delitapas.com!