Olive Oil and Traditional Olive Growing

Olive oil and traditional olive growing constitute one of the oldest and most deeply rooted forms of know-how in rural Portugal. The presence of the olive tree in the territory goes back to prehistoric times, but it is with Romanisation and, later, with the medieval regulation of the trade — one of the first ordinances on the work of the oil-miller was drawn up in Évora at the end of the fourteenth century — that the cultivation of the olive became established as a pillar of the agricultural economy and of diet. More than a product, olive oil is a structuring element of the landscape, the diet and the identity of entire regions of the interior.

The rain-fed olive grove and the olive cycle

The traditional Portuguese olive grove is based above all on trees planted at low density — frequently between 60 and 200 olive trees per hectare — grown under rain-fed conditions, that is, without irrigation, depending only on the rain and the resilience of the tree itself. It is a system of long duration: an olive tree may take fifteen to twenty years to reach full production and remain productive for more than a century, so that many century-old groves still in cultivation today were planted by earlier generations.

Each region consolidated its own varieties. In Trás-os-Montes, Verdeal Transmontana, Madural, Negrinha do Freixo and Cobrançosa predominate; in the Beira, Galega Vulgar and Cordovil de Castelo Branco stand out; and in the Alentejo, Galega coexists with Carrasquenha, Cordovil de Serpa and Verdeal Alentejana. The harvest, traditionally carried out by hand or by beating the branches onto cloths spread on the ground, set the rhythm of the autumn and winter calendar and mobilised families and gangs of workers.

From the oil mill to the know-how

The heart of this tradition is the oil mill, where the olive is transformed into oil. In the classic grinding mills, the paste resulted from crushing the fruit with stone wheels driven by animal, hydraulic or, later, mechanical power; this was followed by pressing in stacked fibre mats and decantation to separate the oil from the vegetable water. This artisanal know-how, flourishing until the mid-twentieth century, underwent a marked decline with the rural exodus and industrial modernisation, leading to the closure and abandonment of countless oil mills, today partly restored as ethnographic heritage.

Trás-os-Montes and the Alentejo remain the country’s great olive-growing territories, the latter responsible for a very significant share of national production. The valorisation of traditional olive oil rests today on the protected designations of origin and on a network of olive tourism that links mills, museums and trails. As the emblematic fat of the Mediterranean diet, olive oil belongs to a broader set of practices recognised within the framework of Portuguese intangible cultural heritage and agricultural heritage, in dialogue with other products of the land such as traditional Portuguese cheeses.