Shades of antiquity in the olive grove

WE WOKE early, hearing voices in the olive grove, and looked out to see men and women moving about in the dappled sunlight, laying a carpet of green plastic netting around a tree.

Men struck the branches with long bamboo poles, and the olives fell.

Women took up the corners of the ‘carpet’ and shook it so that the fallen olives rolled to the centre. They picked out the leaves and twigs, to leave only the fruits. Holding the carpet so as to make a funnel, they poured the olives into a sack and then went on to harvest the fruit of the next tree. Behind them, the morning sun shone on the bright, white shoulders of the Sierra Nevada, covered in snow. It shone out of a vast sky, infinitely blue.

Here, on this small holding, called a ‘cortijo,’ they do not use an olive tree-shaker, as they do in the groves on my brother’s farm, further south, near Seville.

There, the enterprise is larger, and professional pickers move from grove to grove in teams, as they do for the peach and nectarine harvests at the end of summer. One man carries the tree shaker on his back. It has a petrol engine, like that of an outsize strimmer, and a long arm, ending in a V (or gaológ, as my brother and I describe it) which is held against the tree limb and activated so as to shake it severely, causing its harvest to fall onto the mats already in place.

When the crop is picked, the teams, with their tree-shakers, carpets and mini-tractors move on. An oil merchant comes to the farm and inspects the quality of the olives. A price is negotiated, and his trucks arrive to take the bagged olives away.

There are 200 million olive trees in Andalucia.

The scene we are witnessing on this small farm in the Alpujarra is biblical in the sense that, but for the costumes the pickers wear, it might be happening 2,000 years ago. Trees on the farm are over a 1,000 years old.

Trees of such antiquity are not unusual in Andalucia or elsewhere in Mediterranean lands.

These days, classic examples are sometimes removed from the ground in which they have grown for so long and transported to enhance rich men’s gardens or corporate atriums; they are even exported, live. It is not for their crop of olives that they are so valued, but for their beauty and antiquity. They are, indeed, beautiful, their trunks gnarled into amazing shapes, convoluted by the centuries, living testaments to nature’s conquest over time.

As the pickers picked in the glorious morning sunlight, I wrote this article indoors. Houses in the Alpujarra seem to me to be better appointed to keep out the intense summer heat than to withstand the considerable, at times, winter cold. We lit a fire last night, and smoked ourselves out until we got the hang of it.

This morning, there is snow on the mountains on all sides of the town of Órgiva, a phenomenon one of the olive pickers tells me is unusual; they have snow on the mountains to the north every winter but to have it at the same time on the mountain to the south is something that never happens. Is there a change in the climate, I ask? Oh, yes! Claro! Clearly the climate is changing; less rain, more summer heat. One of the women showed me some dried up olives — not enough water, she says; these are useless. Yes, but most of the fruits are fat, half green, half black, glossy, full of oil. Those crushed on the driveway, by our car, become food for the blackcaps and redstarts that haunt the nearby trees. We have occasional over-wintering blackcaps in the garden at home in West Cork; they eat porridge when I put the scrapings of the pot out for them.

Robins and chaffinches like it too.

The olive-harvesters show me the sticks, with natural crooks at the ends, like shepherd’s crooks, which they traditionally use to pull lower branches into reach. Also, they explain that the branches they are cutting away are too leafy. Removing them will strengthen the trees and let the sun into their centres. They will crop more heavily next year.

The sun is warm, so warm one might bask in it. The swimming pool, glorious blue, reflecting the sky, would be far too cold to swim in, but it looks great. Sun glistens on the leaves of the olives. Enough of the cold indoors and the typing machine. I will arise and go now, out into the nurturing warmth of the sun.