EL MOLAR, Spain — The branch, plucked from one of thousands of trees in a densely packed olive grove in this village, has browning leaves and a few tiny, desiccated buds that are bunched near the end. To Agustín Bautista, the branch tells a story, and the story is about a harvest that is doomed. Typically, those buds are green and healthy, and can produce 13,000 gallons of olive oil in a season. That is more than enough for Bautista, a 42-year-old with a booming voice and close-cropped red hair,
A variety of olive oils at a shop in the town of Úbeda, in Spain's olive oil producing province of Jaén, Aug. 26, 2022.
Farmers and political leaders are now searching for answers to a pressing question: What happens to a one-crop economy when that crop is scorched by record-breaking temperatures? The harvest is just the latest setback for the hundreds of villages that dot Jaén and have relied for decades on the olive crop. El Molar has one bar, one church, no restaurants and an official population tally of 237.
The landscape has inspired some of Spain’s greatest poets , singers and painters . Now the groves are turning up on social media. One Jaén farmer who has 1.7 million followers on TikTok makes gargantuan sandwiches, all generously slathered with olive oil. A person armed with a vibradora can shake 1,500 kilograms of olives to the ground in a day. Using the traditional slap-it-with-a-stick technique, the number is closer to 200 kilograms a day.
Without expensive irrigation systems to water trees, many are fruitless. During Bautista’s drive through the groves of El Molar, there was a clear dichotomy: Trees that were quenched from a nearby reservoir, using many miles of black tubing, looked healthy and green. Those that were not were brown and barren.
Felguera, who grew up in Arquillos, remembers two or three snowfalls a year as a child and creeks that were frozen so solid during winter that a rock couldn’t break the ice. Now, winters are dry and short, which he says is even more damaging to olive trees than torrid summers. For much of Jaén, however, that isn’t possible. Most of its groves are on sloping hills where expensive new machines like olive harvesters — essentially, massive $500,000 tractors that drive over 14-foot trees — can’t operate. Inevitably, Jaén is going to lag in productivity compared with groves in California, Chile, Australia and elsewhere, Hernández said.
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