At Hacienda Guzman, Promoting Olive Culture by Celebrating its Diversity

Summary

The Olivotheque at the Hacienda Guzmán in Seville is a botan­i­cal gar­den with 150 vari­eties of olive trees from 13 coun­tries, mak­ing it one of the largest col­lec­tions of cul­ti­vars in the world. The Juan Ramón Guillén Foundation aims to pro­mote olive oil cul­ture through this project, which also includes edu­ca­tional ini­tia­tives for school­child­ren and research on the prop­er­ties of dif­fer­ent olive vari­eties. Additionally, the foun­da­tion is work­ing towards reg­is­ter­ing the Andalusian olive land­scape as a UNESCO World Heritage site to pre­serve the tra­di­tions and val­ues asso­ci­ated with the sec­tor.

Walking along the lines of olive trees of the Olivotheque at the Hacienda Guzmán, one can travel around the olive oil world with­out mov­ing from this estate in Seville.

This sort of botan­i­cal gar­den with 150 vari­eties of olive trees from 13 coun­tries is a world map of the diver­sity of the Olea Europea.

Some 30 years ago, Juan Ramón Guillén, a long-time olive oil pro­ducer and busi­ness­man, began bring­ing back saplings of dif­fer­ent vari­eties of olive trees from his trav­els.

Now, his col­lec­tion is among the largest col­lec­tions of cul­ti­vars of olive trees in the world.

It is one of the main projects of the Juan Ramón Foundation, an orga­ni­za­tion intended to pro­mote olive oil cul­ture: what started out of pas­sion and plea­sure took then a new sci­en­tific and edu­ca­tional turn.

We meet Ana Sánchez, gen­eral coor­di­na­tor of the foun­da­tion, at the entrance of Haciencia Guzmán.

“This is a liv­ing olive trees museum. Our aim is to study and ana­lyze the prop­er­ties of each cul­ti­var. Every har­vest, every year, we ana­lyze the per­for­mance and the prop­er­ties of every vari­ety: their level of polyphe­nols, their level of antiox­i­dants…” she told Olive Oil Times.

This six­teenth-cen­tury estate just 15 km away from Seville was once was man­aged by Hernando Colombus, the son of Christopher Colombus, and played a rel­e­vant role in the first exports of olive oil to the Americas.

It still is a place devoted to olive oil: from the recently restored mill to the mod­ern facil­i­ties where Hacienda Guzmán extra vir­gin olive oil (a com­mer­cial project that runs in par­al­lel to the foun­da­tion) is pro­duced.

The Olivotheque — an orchard-like olive tree arbore­tum — lies in front of the white and red Andalusian-style man­sion.

A vis­i­tor can observe the dif­fer­ent shapes and col­ors of the leaves and com­pare the bunches of tiny Arbequinas from Catalonia with the egg-sized Italian Uovo di Pichone olives, the Portuguese Cobrancosa, the Syrian Chami or the Turkish Kan Celebi.

Some of these cul­ti­vars — such as the Greek Koroneikis or the Nabali from Israel — are exalted for their oil in their coun­tries of ori­gin.

Others, like the big Gordal olives are mainly table olives with very lit­tle oil inter­est. Some are sim­ply orna­men­tal, as the Zarza, a vari­ety whose brain-shaped fruits seem to suf­fer some kind of mal­for­ma­tion.

​“This is what inter­ests us: to see how each cul­ti­var reacts to this soil, to this region, and to this cli­mate. Because we may be sur­prised and there may be a vari­ety from a dif­fer­ent coun­try which works very well here,” Sánchez pointed out.

Olives at the Olivotheque are hand­picked and brought to the mill with the rest of the pro­duc­tion of the estate.

A small amount of oil is pro­duced from them for research pur­poses, but it is not for sale. These trees — being pieces of a ​“museum” — are also treated dif­fer­ently from those in the rest of the estate.

“They are not trimmed. The objec­tive is that this is a botan­i­cal gar­den and to see how they react,” Sánchez explained.

The World Catalogue of Olive vari­eties, pub­lished by the International Olive Council — an inter­gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion of most olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­tries — fea­tures 139 olive cul­ti­vars. Beyond those ​“basic” ones, how­ever, there are hun­dreds more.

Gathering them all in one sin­gle place seems to be an ambi­tious mis­sion.

In Spain alone, there are more than 250 cul­ti­vars, even though just 20 of them are widely spread, and over 60 per­cent of the country’s olive oil pro­duc­tion comes from just a few: Picual, Arbequina, Cornicabra, Hojiblanca, Empeltre, Picudo.

“Our research began in 2011 and 2012, so we are start­ing to see the results now,” Sánchez said.

“We’ve obtained good results espe­cially with the Lechín vari­ety, which is a cul­ti­var that we don’t grow at the estate, but we see has very pos­i­tive prop­er­ties. Also the Arbosana, which is a vari­ety that has a very nice fla­vor and gives a very scented oil. And the Frantoio as well. It’s an Italian cul­ti­var which is respond­ing very well to this land,” she added.

Educating the pub­lic and spread­ing the rich­ness of the olive oil cul­ture is also one of the objec­tives of the foun­da­tion and the Olivotheque.

Schoolchildren come here to learn about this diver­sity and how olive oil is pro­duced, as well as about its ben­e­fits for their health.

“They start with a small tast­ing where they com­pare for instance Arbequina oil with Picual oil, which are very dif­fer­ent. Then they choose which one they like the most and they have a healthy break­fast. Here in Spain we have the habit of con­sum­ing olive oil, but very often we are not aware of its ben­e­fits,” Sánchez remarked.

Beyond the Olivotheque and its edu­ca­tional projects, the Juan Ramón Guillén Foundation is pro­mot­ing the Andalusian bid to reg­is­ter its olive land­scape as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

This is a long-term project that started in 2012 and, if suc­cess­ful, may reach to an end in the sum­mer of 2020.

“This is some­thing intan­gi­ble. It encom­passes five provinces in Southern Spain: Córdoba, Granada, Jaén, Málaga and Sevilla,” Sánchez explains.

“We are talk­ing about the olive groves here, but also about the pro­fes­sions that are linked to them, tra­di­tions, con­struc­tion, archi­tec­ture, gas­tron­omy… every­thing that sur­rounds the sec­tor. So, in the end, it would end up being a way to ensure that these tra­di­tions are not lost. That this value is not lost.”