18,000 New Olive Trees were Planted in days
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Olive Oil in Spain
If you live in Spain, it’s impossible for olive oil not to be a part of your daily life. We douse our toast with it for breakfast, swirl it over our salads for lunch, and begin practically every recipe with it for dinner.
In a country where people consume more than 2.5 gallons (10 litres) of oil per year. It’s almost impossible to find a plate without at least a few drops of liquid gold. And while deciding among the dozens of bottles of Spanish olive oil at the grocery store may seem intimidating, it’s worth brushing up on the basics so you can choose the best. You can read much more from this great website.
So, why am I writing this blog about olive oil?
Well; I live (or did live) in the middle of wheat fields that are surrounded by olive groves; not now though! In the last week, acres of land around me have been covered in new olive tree saplings; 18,000, to be exact.
It happened, almost overnight. Some farmers turned up with tractors that plant the saplings semi-automatically. Hundreds of trees were planted on the first night, and, by day three, almost 3000 had been deposited into the soil. This new method of farming olives to make olive oil will make the process more high-tec and less reliant on manual labour. Planted in rows, these trees can be harvested by one machine and a lorry. Like in this Youtube video.
Andalucia is the biggest Olive Oil producer in the world
Andalusia, the world’s largest olive oil-producing region by a wide margin, saw its olive groves increase by 0.6 per cent in 2021, rising to 1,673,071 hectares – an area slightly larger than Connecticut.
After Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha is Spain’s second-largest olive-growing region and experienced slightly more growth with olive grove surface area rising by 1.3 per cent to 449,388 hectares. See more of this article.
I live smack-bang, right in the middle of all this olive oil. The olive factory is 1 km from my house. Now I have the trees closing in on me!
Never mind, I won’t go short of something to put on my salad.
Be sure to check out the different varieties of oil when you come and visit Nerja.
You can also go on tours of the olive oil factories at different locations. This is a very interesting production process and well worth a visit. It is also a pleasant day walking through the groves, some of which can stretch for endless miles.