The trees that were nearly sold
For three decades, the oldest olive trees in Europe were dug out of the ground and sold as ornament.
They went to hotel forecourts, roundabouts, private gardens. A tree that had stood a thousand years could be lifted onto a lorry in a morning, and a great many did not survive the journey. More than 150,000 people have since signed a petition to the European Parliament asking for the uprooting and trade of ancient trees to be banned.
Counting them was the first defence. You cannot protect what nobody has written down.
A river the Romans called oil
Where Valencia, Catalonia and Aragón meet, the Sénia river runs down to the sea through twenty-seven municipalities. The Romans called it Oleum Flumen — the river of oil. The Via Augusta crossed it on its way north.
The road came first. The trees followed, and outlasted it.
This is now the densest concentration of ancient olive trees anywhere on earth. Around five thousand are catalogued, most of them Farga — a variety slow enough to take a century before it gives a serious crop, and stubborn enough to still be giving one at a thousand.
December 2018
On 21 December 2018 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization entered this landscape into its register of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems — the same list that holds the rice terraces of the Philippines and the oases of the Maghreb.
The citation is worth reading closely. What the FAO recognised was not a monument. It was a working landscape, and it named the thing that keeps one alive: bringing abandoned ancient trees back into production.
Why they are still standing
A tree behind a fence is a tourist attraction. A tree that is harvested is a tree with a reason to remain.
That is the whole economy of this place. The groves that still yield fruit are the groves nobody has had to sell. Every autumn the crop is taken by hand, because no machine has ever been built that can work a trunk this shape — hollow at the centre, folded in on itself, wide enough that two people cannot join hands around it.
The oil is cold extracted within hours of picking, before the fruit has time to change its mind.
The bottle
Square glass. Wooden cork. Deep green and gold. Each bottle individually numbered.
A limited release from trees older than the language on this label.
The first release is not bottled yet. When it is, there will not be many. If you would like to be told before anyone else, the register is just below.