Spanish Gold

A lone farmer rakes the grassy grove, collecting the olives that he’s just swatted off his trees, plum-red, green, and black-tinted. “I have a machine that holds a branch and shakes it, or we have a pole to hit the branches,” says Claudio Perez Fernandez whose family has owned olive groves here for generations. “These trees can be 400 years old, as you can see their wide trunks,” he says, while showing us his yield: two crates of the multi-colored fruit. 

It’s harvest time in Extremadura’s rural Sierra de Gata, a mountainous region along the Portuguese border, just south of Spain’s province of Salamanca, where olive groves are seemingly everywhere. They cluster amid vineyards, forested hillsides, and sheep-filled pasturelands. They grow near scenic villages that nestle within verdant valleys and pop out on hilltops alongside castle ruins.

We met Perez while hiking on a path lined with olive farms on the outskirts of San Martín de Trevejo, a village with half-timbered homes, where water running off the mountains trickles down grooves on cobbled streets. It was the ancient Phoenicians who introduced olive trees to the Iberian Peninsula 3,000 years ago, and since then crops flourished and have become — particularly in this region — a traditional part of everyday life. 

“We are in a mix of stones, of geology, nature and landscapes, but around all areas we see those olives groves,” explains Eduardo Mostazo, a local outdoor guide leading our hike. “They are so important for us, for everything.”

Olive oil mills: a thing of the past and present

Our group is spending three nights near the town of Villamiel at the Aqua et Oleum hotel, a name meaning “water and oil” in Latin, and no doubt appropriately named. “This was an actual olive oil mill opened in 1920,” says hotel manager Sophia Lindemann. “The creek next to us was the engine of the mill. You can see the big water wheel on the outside wall.” Inside, gears and pipes and the actual stone wheels atop the olive-crushing pit remain. 

“The olives got pressed and the oil would flow into stone barrels in the floor,” adds Lindemann, further explaining how workers burned the dried mash in the fireplace to keep warm. “They probably processed about 800 to 1,000 liters of oil a day working day and night shifts.” The mill closed in the early 1980s.

There’s a stark comparison, however, between yesteryear’s presses and modern olive oil mills. At the As Pontis mill in nearby Eljas, conveyor belts transport the ripened fruit to steel vats where olives are washed and then crushed, squeezing the .…

By Richard Varr