THE LAND

The 5,000 olive trees of Taldarroba withstand temperatures of more than 42 degrees in summer and freezing, below-zero temperatures in December. When autumn comes, as though by a miracle, the fruit appears, nature’s greatest exponent, to be transformed into that coveted, green-coloured, liquid gold. A tiny island in the vast olive sea of Spain, which contains over 280 million olive trees, just over 10% of which are in Extremadura. A place where the most prized legacy parents have passed down to children is the message of respect for the land, a land where three basic elements – soil, sun and water – combine discretely and capriciously in order to perpetuate a tradition as ancient and Mediterranean as oil and wine production, year after year; a place where the only transformation of the fruit is entrusted to a nature that is cruel and relentless on some occasions, and generous and comforting on many others.

It is on this vast peneplain with extraordinary blue skies, where from dawn cicada song announces the heat of summer days, in striking contrast to the harshness of the dry, cold winter days, and here alone, that our splendid, varied types of oil come into being, an oil with an unmistakeable flavour, so sensitive to the palate that its notes reveal the moment the fruit is harvested. This is how the genesis of the oil takes place, oil altered by nothing more than the climate itself, as the land takes care of all the rest, in conjunction with a purely mechanical, ancestral process, to obtain the juice of the olive.