Olives

At the heart of Orgiva lies la acietuna (the olive). The town is set in a valley besieged by olive trees, not the short stumpy mechanically harvested olives that are further north, but the ancient olives with thick knarly trunks and high branches. So at this time of year the valley reverberates with the sound of bamboo sticks smacking branches and olives raining down into tarps. Its been done this way a long time.

So I got an invite from Piluka, our Spanish teacher, to help her partner and his friends harvest olives for the organic mill. Sounded like fun. I met them and was quickly armed with a bamboo pole and started bashing the high branches. Incidentally, I recommend sunglasses for beginners as its hard to dodge the 500 olives plummeting down from directly above. So we started at 9.30am, sticks down for the first refreshment at 10 - and a carton of beer came out. The frequency remained metronomic throughout the day and I came home very pleased with my first day - apparently.

The team consisted of a Basque, German, Dutchman, Belgian, Spaniard and myself (Amber and the boys did some stick work as well)...so it was truly multinational. Conversation was in a mixture of Spanish, Flemish and English, sentences often containing all three. Anyway it was great practice for our Spanish which, though not brilliant, is progressing.

After a week we went into the mill (molina) run by a guy known locally as 'once huevos' pronounced onsay hwayvos (11 eggs) ...for obvious reasons!

There were celebrations aplenty and an afternoon bar session when we got 250 litres of golden oil (aciete) out of our tonne of olives. So I learned a whole lot about olives and oil...extra virgin is not necessarily green, colour doesn't necessarily imply flavour and I can strongly recommend drinking organic oil after seeing what goes into the standard oil! I also found that Spanish families consume at least 60 litres a year, one I heard drank 250 litres...and there are plenty of oldies about!