Category: Southern Spain

WHAT DO [WE] DO WITH OUR OLIVES? DO [WE] MAKE THEM INTO OIL?

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Andalusia, Axarquia, Extra Virgin, First Cold-pressed oil, Olive Harvest, Olive Oil, Olive trees, Olives, Southern Spain

THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION/S WE ARE ASKED THE MOST…*

Well, not exactly, is the answer, in that they do all nearly end up as oil, but the oil is not made by us.

Olive presses, in all their forms, are serious pieces of machinery and far too ambitious and expensive for a small farm like ours. That is why, we, in common with all of our neighbouring growers take our harvests to one of the several local presses or factories.

Most of the larger growers will typically belong to a cooperative such as the one in our local village, and which has its own press. Smaller “independent” growers like us will head to one of the nearby commercial operations.

This year’s olive harvest on the back of our truck. Half an imperial ton, so not bad for two old codgers!

The larger growers will have hundreds of trees, sometimes thousands, producing several tons of fruit. Smaller growers like us, will have anything from half-a-dozen to a hundred trees, giving crops from a couple of sacks to a couple of tons. When we purchased our finca in 1993 it had only three young olive trees (the finca being then primarily turned over to almond and vines). Since then, we have planted around fifty more olive trees which is about as many we can handle on our own, vis-à-vis, annual pruning, burning off and harvesting.

The guy before us at the press, with nearly a ton and a half of olives…

We normally harvest in late December/early January. The smaller trees we pick simply by hand, but the larger trees in heavy crop, require the setting up of nets and the use of whacking-sticks, and picking all the fruits often means quite a bit of climbing too. Fortunately, Dido and I both retain an almost childlike enthusiasm for tree-climbing!

Most of the local presses (including the cooperative) produce first cold-pressed extra-virgin oil. However, as a rule, to get a proportion of your own oil back, one’s load must exceed 500 kilos (half a metric tonne / about 1100 pounds). Although our crop is doubling each year, now that our trees are all “on-line”, we still only managed about 250 kilos this past harvest. This means that although we do get about 20 litres of fabulous oil in exchange (the press retains 50% of the oil yield), it is not actually ours. Hopefully, if this coming year is as fecund as the last, next year we will comfortably reach the 500 kilo target and receive oil from our own fruits for the first time.

Our olives, ready for the press.

As for our local Axarquian oil, it is famed throughout Spain for its low acidity, and its smooth, slightly peppery apple flavours. Of course I am biased, but I far prefer it to most mainland-French and mainland-Italian oils, which tend to be too astringent for my taste. In style, our oil compares well with, and is very similar to those from Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Greece and the Levant. Fundamentally, the stronger the sun, the smoother and more buttery the olive oil.

* The header photo shows our main olive grove, about eight years ago, a year or two before they all began to yield significant amounts of olive.

Andalucia in Winter

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Andalusia, Axarquia, Climate Science, Maroma, Sierra Tajeda, Southern Spain, Spain, Winter Landscape

not all blue skies and warm weather

Our local mountain, Maroma, snow capped this April, for the first time in several years. A welcome wintery scene, guaranteeing this year’s water supply to the pueblos and springs.

We purchased our finca and moved to the Axarquia region of Andalucia in 1993. Like many people unfamiliar with the region and its seasons, we were surprised by the severity of our first winter, both with regards to its length and its chilly dampness. 93/94 was particularly harsh, with heavy rains beginning in late August and continuing off and on until mid April. The tops of the sierras were regularly blanketed in snow, and shrouded in dark cloud, and for much of the time our own hills felt more like those of Cumbria than of southern Iberia.

The Axarquian locals have a distinctly ambivalent attitude to their winters; on the one hand, many being farmers or related to farmers, they celebrate the breaking of the summer droughts and the first rains, but on the other hand; being true Andalusians they quickly tire of the cold and the damp and long for the return of the Spring sunshine.

In the winter of 2006 it wasn’t only the sierras that got a covering of snow . This was at our late friend and neighbour, Edgar’s place, and one of his two rescued Shetland ponies looking as happy as Larry in the wintery conditions.

The summer of our arrival in 1993 marked the end of about seven years of overly dry winters for much of the Mediterranean rim, with several climate scientists confidently predicting that our part of Spain “would resemble the Sahara by 2003”. Fortunately, the predictions proved wildly incorrect, both with that winter’s appropriately biblical rains, and then the following six or seven being equally long, wet and often very cold. One year, for example, about 30% of the Rio Velez Valley avocado and mango orchards were destroyed by a harsh early-winter frost. Subsequent to those first 14 years, we’ve experienced smaller runs of wet and then dryish winters, the latest such dryish run being the last four years which thankfully broke this winter, with long periods of rain, filling reservoirs and the reassuring sight of snow-peaked sierras.

However accurate or not the predictions of the climate scientists have proven, or will prove for this corner of Europe, the coming of the Sahara still feels a long way off.

Edgar’s stallion Ned however looking a little less certain with his first experience of the white stuff, even if wearing the appropriate tartan. And remember, this was three years after climate scientists had predicted that this would be a Saharan scene…

BEAUTY IN DRAB PLACES

by adamhalevi, posted in Almuñécar, Art Photography, churreria, Food travel, Granada, Jazz en la Costa Festival, Jazz granada, Portrait Photography, Southern Spain, Spain, Vermeer

and if vermeer had USED an iphone…

In my previous post I described several instances of discovering wonderful food in the plainest of locations, and since I published that piece, I have also discovered human beauty in an unexpected location.

It happened in Almuñécar, a seaside town on the Granada coast. We were there for the annual “Jazz en la Costa” music festival, when we were enjoying a late post concert beer at an all-night churreria and crisp (chip) frying shack on the beach.

Dido, our friend Pepa and I were feeling a bit down having just witnessed a hugely disappointing performance by the legendary jazz pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim. Unfortunately the elder statesman of South African jazz had a very bad night indeed, constantly hitting off-notes and missing his queues. And that, compounded by the hapless attempts of his sax and double bass accompaniasts to occasionally play jazz riffs on piccolo and cello respectively! So embarrassingly awful was the performance, that we upped and left early to seek solace in some liquid refreshment, and so found ourselves at the churreria.

Within seconds of sitting down at the table I became captivated by a scene of such elegant industry and confident movement, the recent memory of Mr Ibrahim’s faltering piano playing drifted away on the Mediterranean night breeze.

These images are my photoshopped fun attempt to turn a few hastily snapped iPhone photos of that effortlessly stylish scene into a modern-day Vermeer-esque tableau. I hope they please…

“SPAIN ‘URTS”

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Almonds, Andalusia, Andalusian wines, Axarquia, Campo and Campesinos, farming, Finca, Finca Carmel, Malaga Wine, Moscatel (Muscat) Grape, Mountain Sac, Olives, Phoenicians, Southern Spain, Spain

BLOOD, SWEAT AND TOIL IN THE AXARQUIA*

Having just returned from another fortnight stint working our finca in the Axarquian mountains, sporting our latest collection of cuts, bruises and aching muscles, I was reminded of the wise words that head this post, uttered by the late lamented Fred, an early, fellow British, expatriate neighbour.

A neighbour proudly showing off the succulent fruits of his labours…Moscatel grape has been grown in the area since the time of the Phoenician settlers, and used for both raisins and sweet, strong wine. The grape constitutes the main ingredient of Malaga wine (which predates Sherry by many centuries), and was hugely popular across the Europe of the Elizabethan age.

Fred, a taciturn Yorkshireman, when he did offer his rare nuggets of wisdom, had an uncanny way of getting right to the heart of the matter under discussion, and never were his few words wiser or truer than when he coined the now famous phrase (famous in our neighbourhood at least!), “Spain ‘urts”.

What many tourists and visitors to the region might not appreciate, in awe as they are of the stunning landscape of Andalucía, is that the agricultural land itself is mostly rocky, jagged, prickly and generally unforgiving for those who have to work it. Moreover, while the soil is often fertile, it is a fecundity requiring arduous effort to extract, and if Andalucía in general, is hard country to farm, then the mountainous slopes of the Axarquia often verge on the impossible.

A man trudges back to his finca with a snack for his mule…There were few metalled roads in 1993, and most campesinos used mules and donkeys, for both transportation and ploughing their land.

This is why most of the agriculture of the region was for centuries, the exclusive domain of those both sufficiently hardy, and expediently motivated – or, in other words, the local peasant citizenry of the dozens of pueblos blancos (white villages) which dot the countryside like so many bleached apiaries. And like bees, these small, tough, resourceful workers would leave their village hives for the summer months and move into their finca homes, to tend their vines, pick their crops of grapes and nuts, dry their raisins, and finally, before returning to their pueblos, make their strong, sweet, fortifying mountain sacs.

A goatherd takes a rest…Goats and sheep, and their keepers were a mixed blessing in the campo; while providing good cheese and excellent meat they could be incredibly destructive if not guarded carefully, forcing many of us to reluctantly fence off our land.

Finca’s (privately owned small farms, or small-holdings) are dotted across the countryside in a seemingly random and chaotic, ill-fitting jigsaw of orchards and vineyards, that reflects the interminable division of parcels down the generations, from fathers to sons and mothers to daughters. In 1991, when we (and Fred) moved to the area, fincas were still a major source of self-employment and income for much of the Spanish agrarian working class, and being a “bueno campesino” (a good peasant farmer) earned one a measure of respect within the tight-knit pueblo communities.

But as Fred implied, this might have been an honourable life, but it was also painful and unforgiving. Hence, and quite understandably, as Spain softened and modernised, the attraction of the “campo life” dramatically decreased for the children of the pueblos whose gaze strayed hungrily to the newly flourishing cities and towns, with their universities, and their opportunities of well-paid work and rewarding careers.

Our neighbour “Curro” – not only a fine and proud campesino, but also a skilled ploughman.

This changing demographic is nowhere more starkly illustrated than in our own locality, where the vineyards, raisin-drying beds and almond groves are steadily disappearing, and the old finca cottages are either left to crumble back into the landscape from which they emerged, or are converted into tourist b&bs. Dido and I, together with an aging and dwindling generation of mostly 60-somethings are rapidly manifesting as living relics, as we continue to brave the constant cuts and bruises, the back-breaking tending of vines and trees, wasp stings, and extremes of weather (hot and cold, dry and wet).

What happens when we are all gone is already being mapped out, as the valleys, and easier lower slopes, are all being transformed into fashionable, low maintenance and lucrative plantations of avocado and mango. (The fact that these new “super crops” require hugely greater volumes of water to flourish than the traditional crops and that they are a disaster waiting to happen, is whole other story…)

My drawings of campesinos displayed here were done during our first summer at our new home, in 1993, and are a reminder of how things used to be, when Spain (at least our part of Spain) really ‘urt…

“Old Juan” – another neighbour, and typically long-lived. It’s interesting to note that our local village is full of noctogarians like Juan, who swear by their daily shot of brandy or anis at breakfast, and a glass or three of their own wine in the evening. Other factors, such as their active lifestyles and diets must also be taken into account. In common with all Iberians, our locals are fanatics for fresh fish, with inexpensive anchovies and squid (brought up daily to the villages by mobile fish mongers) being central to their daily diets. This, in conjunction with the fact that meat consumption was often confined to what people grew themselves – the family pig, rabbits and chickens, always accompanied by mountains of their homegrown vegetables and legumes which must also contribute to their general longevity.
  • Header photo is a panoramic view of the campo as viewed from our finca – looking south-east – in 1993.

WHERE THE GRASS IS (nearly) ALWAYS BROWNER…

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Almond Blossom, Andalusia, Axarquia, Coronovirus / Covid-19, Finca Carmel, Oxford, Sierra Tajeda, Southern Spain

…BUT WHERE THE ALMOND blossom is ALWAYS WHITER

I nearly titled this as a third straight “yearning” post, in the sense that after three months lock-down here in Oxford we are desperate to get back to our finca in southern Spain. But seeing as we are actually returning there tomorrow I decided on a catchier and hopefully more optimistic heading.

In fairness, when we’ve been in Spain for as long as we’ve now been in England there’s plenty I miss about our other lives in London and Oxford, but the longing is rarely as intense as what we are experiencing right now for our Andalusian home.

And perhaps there’s the clue; the fact that our little farm in the foothills of the Sierra Tajeda is the nearest thing Dido and I have ever had to a settled home. We’ve certainly owned it for more than three times as long as any of our previous homes (separately or together), and then there’s all the sweat and blood we’ve dripped into the building of our house and the rocky soil upon which it stands.

But perhaps, more than all of that, it’s simply the way the setting of our finca has ingrained itself into the fabric of our being through the sheer power of its ridiculous beauty.

So, although we missed wonders like the almond blossom display this year, thanks to about thirty years of memories, and images like the ones on show here, we can never truly miss them – they live inside of us, rendering us unusually fortunate.

“THERE IS ANOTHER SKY…” *

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam Green, Antafogasta, Arabah, Atacama, Australia, Axarquia, Canillas de Aceituno, Chile, Cloud Formations, Galilee, Israel, Landscape Photography, Lorne, Victoria, Netanya, Sea of Galilee, Sky Photography, Southern Ghats, Southern India, Southern Spain, travel, Victoria

With the festive season well underway (Hanukkah is already over) and the year wrapping up, we now find ourselves dashing madly between Jönköping, London, Oxford and finally Malaga. All of which means that once again I have only a little time for writing these posts.

Normal service will be resumed in the new year, but for now and the following post, my pictures will have to do most of the talking for themselves. In this case, here is a collection of amazing skies I have been fortunate to find myself beneath from time to time, both at home and on our travels…

*Emily Dickinson

Altocumulus floccus – Antofagasta – Chile

Pisa – Italy

Altocumulus lenticularis duplicatus  at sunset – Axarquia – Spain
Winter Sky – Canillas de Aceituno – Spain
Lorne Pier – Victoria – Australia

Winter Sky – Netanya – Israel
Sun Break – Southern Ghaats  – India

Altocumulus stratiformis translucidus undulatus – Atacama – Chile
The Golden Hour – Netanya – Israel

The Sea and Hills of Galilee from the Golan Heights – Israel

Water Spout about to Hit the Shore – Netanya – Israel

DANCERS

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Ballet, Dance, Dancers, Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, Southern Spain

Having had such a positive response to my earlier post “The Morning After…” I’m now following that up with another series of images which have done well for me in the past, having given them a similar treatment to the nudes.

These originate from studies I did of my wife Dido and a girlfriend of hers – another ex-Royal ballerina – as they kindly posed and pranced around for me one evening here on our terrace in southern Spain many exotic moons ago.

Enjoy…

DOG DAYS 8 – “THE LAST ALMOND”

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Almonds, Andalusia, Southern Spain

I’ve saved the most prosaic of my 1994 “Dog Days” comic strips for last. Prosaic in the sense that this is an experience, that to one degree or another almost everyone viewing this site will have gone through themselves – that infuriating feeling of the last, biggest, juiciest fruit being just out of reach. Perhaps, the only difference with almond trees though, from say apple, cherry or even blackberry picking, is that one does not customarily shake and whack the b’Jesus out of the host plant to acquire every last fruit. Professional farmers even have specially designed, automated tree-shaking machines for doing the job.

However, down here at least in the Axarquia region of Andalusia almond trees are not irrigated during the drought season, and while this ensures the almonds have a richer more intense flavour, it also makes the trees highly resinous, thus causing many of the nuts to cling stubbornly to the branches.

Basically, the work is hot, sticky, scratchy, itchy, back-breaking and in the past, financially unrewarding. So, about six years after I made this comic we replaced our main almond orchard with a vineyard, the planting of which was also back-breaking, but with the promise of greater fulfillment – through the act of wine-making – and a hugely greater income. But, as our luck would have it, the market for traditional Malaga wines collapsed about the time I planted our last vine, with the almond price (due to the fruit’s recent elevation to “super-food” status) rising exponentially in the last ten years.

Still, at least we have enough Malaga wine for six lifetimes…

HEAVEN ON EARTH…

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Finca, Southern Spain

Spanish Idyl

I’m sitting on my south terrace of my house in the Sierra Tajeda foothills as I compose this piece. To the right hand side of my laptop is a Jim Beam marked glass filled to the brim with Moscow Vodka and tonic, with a thick chunk of our home grown sweet lime floating on the top.

Emanating from the open library window to my right are the divine strains of late great Victoria de los Angeles singing Chants d’Auvergne in her deliciously rounded mezzo soprano, so suited to those gently moody ancient lullabies.

Behind me, inside the main room of the house is a freshly caught sea bass patiently waiting in the fridge to form the substantial part of my imminent supper.

Before me, between the oleanders and cypresses, in the near-but-heat-hazy distance is the Mediterranean Sea, in which my bass was still swimming only this morning.

As the shadows begin to lengthen, and defined colours replace blinding monochrome, at last the excoriating heat of the day is giving way to the sensual caressing cool of the south-Spanish evening.

But for the fact I am missing my wife Dido, who is driving in heavy traffic from Oxford to London as I sit here typing these words, I really think I could almost be in heaven.

The picture above dates back to when we first moved here – with our Maremma sheepdog Aura – and the only available shade was under our old carob tree (in fact, the only mature tree we had). That was also heaven, albeit minus the laptops,  stereos and Russian Vodka, which all goes to show, that even heaven, like just about everything else, is merely a relative concept…