Spain’s living ‘monuments’ - olive trees which date back centuries

TRAIGUERA, SPAIN // The sun sets in eastern Spain and dozens of ancient olive trees cast long shadows on the ground.

Once dug up and sold as luxury items for the wealthy, they are increasingly protected as farmers and authorities realise these trees, some of which were planted by the Romans, are an invaluable part of Spain’s heritage.

Near the town of Traiguera, farmer Amador Peset, 37, gets out of his old 4x4 and, in the biting wind, cuts across a field before stopping before a majestic tree.

“You’re probably in front of the biggest olive tree in the world ... with a girth of 10.2 metres (33.5 feet),” he says, proudly.

Botanists say a circumference of 10 metres indicates a tree is over a thousand years old — which means this specimen was around when the region was still under Muslim rule.

Mr Peset lovingly tends 106 such “monuments”, cleaning their gnarled branches and clearing away weeds that suck their sap like vampires.

Joan Porta, another farmer, says that only a few years ago, olive trees were largely ignored in fieldstha were also filled with almond and other fruit trees, vines or wheat. In fact, they were often chopped up for firewood.

“Now we realise that they are thousand-year-old trees,” says Mr Porta, 75, pointing to the jewel in his own field’s crown.

It is aged 1,702 years according to a dating method used by the Polytechnic University of Madrid — which means it was planted under the Roman emperor Constantine.

Brought to Spain by the Greeks and the Romans, olive trees now cover 2.5 million hectares of land.

Such is the attraction of these long-living trees that they have become a must-have luxury item for some wealthy people.

Maria Teresa Adell manages an association of 27 towns and cities in the Valencia region — including Traiguera — as well as the neighbouring areas of Catalonia and Aragon, which, among other things, works towards protecting their olive tree heritage.

According to the group, hundreds of the ancient trees were ripped out during the 2000s and taken away to be sold for high prices in garden centres or specialised auctions.

Online foreign garden centres still offer “ancient” olive trees for sale, such as Todd’s Botanics in Britain, where one specimen from Valencia is priced at 3,500 pounds ($4,300, 4,100 euros).

“I buy one or two every year,” says owner Mark Macdonald, adding however that he only purchases trees already in ready-to-plant clods.

As for those who buy them, they tend to have money — people such as French wine magnate Bernard Magrez, who says the grounds of several of his Bordeaux estates including the prestigious Chateau Pape Clement, contain olive tees aged “between 1,015 and 1,860 years”.

For Cesar-Javier Palacios, spokesman for the Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente environmental foundation, taking them away from their native soil “is like taking a cathedral and putting it somewhere else.”

Not so, argues Roamhy Machoir-Heras, who organised a big ancient olive tree auction in 2011 where Mr Magrez bought his specimens.

Hers were already in clods. “We saved them,” she said. Some of the 44 specimens sold for more than 60,000 euros. Those that didn’t go to Mr Magrez’s estates went to a “sumptuous collection” in the Middle East, she added.

However, a petition launched by Mr Palacios “against the plundering of old olive trees” has 154,000 signatures so far.

“We are asking ... for regulations banning the traffic, like for ivory,” he said.

Concepcion Munoz, an agronomist at the University of Cordoba, has counted 260 different varieties in Spain, some of which have only one specimen left. In 2006, the Valencia region banned the digging up of trees with more than a six-metre girth.

Various parts of Valencia, Catalonia and Aragon have also inventoried nearly 5,000 of the oldest trees with a view to protecting what Ms Adell insists is “the highest concentration of ancient olive trees in the world,” says Ms Adell, (although Italy and Greece might beg to differ.)

To persuade farmers, Ms Adell ‘s association has come up with an economic argumen. Oil from officially protected trees sells for around 18 euros locally, 40 euros in Barcelona and up to p to 90 euros in China.

Mr Peset, for one, is sold on the idea. He is negotiating to sell a thousand bottles to the Chinese for use in cosmetics.

* Agence France Presse