An Award to Promote Olive Oil Culture in Spain

The Agustín Serés Memorial Award rec­og­nizes indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive efforts to pro­mote, dis­sem­i­nate and memo­ri­al­ize olive oil cul­ture in Spain.

Entries for the ninth edi­tion of the award are now open and will be accepted until March 19.

“There are many awards ded­i­cated to rec­og­niz­ing the qual­i­ties of olive oil in our coun­try and world­wide, but it is excep­tional to rec­og­nize the cul­ture of oil and the per­sonal effort put into mak­ing it,” Paco Lorenzo, one of the judges of this year’s com­pe­ti­tion and the win­ner of the first edi­tion, said.

“In fact, I still think that the cul­ture of olive oil is really an unre­solved issue for the cit­i­zens of this coun­try,” he added.

Lorenzo was unan­i­mously selected as the win­ner of the 2010 con­test for his book, Museos del Aceite en España (Olive Oil Museums of Spain), for which he vis­ited 88 olive oil muse­ums through­out the coun­try, dis­cussing cul­ture and his­tory through pho­tographs.

Lorenzo did not enter the con­test that year, but the Serés Santamaria fam­ily, who spon­sor the event, unan­i­mously decided to award him the prize for his 2008 book.

“We already knew about Dr. Lorenzo’s work and trav­els around Spain look­ing for olive oil resources for some time,” Agustín Serés said. ​“The book is unique in its kind in our coun­try.”

Serés is a doc­tor but grew up on an olive oil mill in an area of north­east­ern Spain with a rich olive oil her­itage.

“I was born in Alpicat, Lérida, in the heart of Segrià, in a fam­ily that had a small oil mill, one of the four that the town had then,” he said. ​“That lit­tle oil mill is now a museum ded­i­cated to the cul­ture of olive oil. From this arises my link with our ances­tral olive oil cul­ture.”

Serés Sr pro­duced olive oil at the mill with very lim­ited resources, which was typ­i­cal at the time. As olive oil pro­duc­tion shifts toward larger oper­a­tions, Serés Jr uses these awards to pre­vent this past from becom­ing for­got­ten.

“I wanted to know the per­sonal effort that my father made could be pre­served along with our fam­ily her­itage for the enjoy­ment of oth­ers,” he said. “[I also wanted these awards] to cover a space in the cul­ture of olive oil in the Segrià region that has always been an olive-grow­ing region.”

The Serés Santamaria fam­ily now work with Lorenzo and Olearum, of which he is pres­i­dent, to award the €1,000 prize each year.

This year, con­tes­tants will be able to sub­mit projects about the envi­ron­ment of olive oil, new tech­nolo­gies, his­tory, gas­tron­omy, and her­itage con­ser­va­tion, among oth­ers. However, some­times other fac­tors, such as the entry’s social com­mit­ment, can be the decid­ing fac­tor.

“Last year’s edi­tion was very dis­puted, in the end, there were two entries tied, but one of them had a greater social com­mit­ment, par­tic­u­larly with peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties and that decided the bal­ance,” Lorenzo said.

Colival, an olive oil coop­er­a­tive based in Valdepeñas, won the award for their oleo­tourism pro­gram, which was aimed at inform­ing chil­dren about the health, organolep­tic and gas­tro­nomic virtues of extra-vir­gin olive oil.

“We thought that it was a project that could be adopted by mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies and coop­er­a­tives in our coun­try,” Lorenzo said. ​“The dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fac­tor was that it worked exten­sively to spread olive oil cul­ture and included peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties in the project.”

Normally between five and 10 projects are pre­sented each year. Projects may be re-entered, but win­ning projects can not. According to Lorenzo, sev­eral projects that have won did so on their sec­ond try.

Serés is look­ing for­ward to this year’s entrants, both old and new. Since he began giv­ing out the awards in 2010, Serés said he has noticed a revival in olive oil cul­ture in the region.

“The award-win­ning projects are a mag­nif­i­cent exam­ple that with lit­tle means, you can achieve mag­nif­i­cent and suc­cess­ful goals that exem­plify the cul­ture of olives and olive oil,” he said.

Contestants can send a com­pleted entry form via email to [email protected].