Navarra’s Aceite Artajo Marries Cutting-Edge Tech with Centuries of Olive Oil Heritage

Summary

Aceite Artajo in Ribera de Navarra is prepar­ing for the upcom­ing olive har­vest, aim­ing to main­tain or improve the qual­ity of their extra vir­gin olive oils. The farm, with a his­tory dat­ing back cen­turies, focuses on qual­ity, sus­tain­abil­ity, and inno­va­tion, using mod­ern tech­nol­ogy and organic farm­ing meth­ods to pro­duce top-qual­ity olive oils while embrac­ing ini­tia­tives like oleo­tourism to edu­cate con­sumers about their prod­ucts.

In the fer­tile Ribera de Navarra, where the Ebro Valley stretches between the Bardenas desert and the snow-capped Moncayo, Aceite Artajo is get­ting ready for the com­ing olive har­vest.

“After a dif­fi­cult flow­er­ing period due to high tem­per­a­tures, the har­vest looks to be aver­age, so we are sat­is­fied and hope to main­tain or improve the qual­ity of last sea­son’s extra vir­gin olive oils,” said Andrea Urzaiz Huguet, qual­ity and mar­ket­ing man­ager at Artajo.

In typ­i­cal sea­sons, the har­vest in Artajo’s cor­ner of north­west­ern Spain lasts for a few weeks from the first days of October. Choosing the cor­rect har­vest time allows the farm to pro­duce a wide range of olive oils.

However, Urzaiz said her fam­ily has plenty of expe­ri­ence, with roots in the olive oil busi­ness dat­ing back sev­eral cen­turies. 

“The ori­gin of Aceite Artajo dates back to the 18^th cen­tury, when the Artajo fam­ily pro­duced extra vir­gin olive oil in the his­toric cen­ter of Tudela, until the 1960s,” Urzaiz said. 

“After a pro­duc­tion hia­tus in the 20^th cen­tury, the olive-grow­ing tra­di­tion was revived in 1998 with the plant­ing of new olive trees at Los Llanos estate,” she added. ​“Later, in 2007, a mod­ern oil mill was built to pro­duce early-har­vest extra vir­gin olive oils of the high­est qual­ity.”

According to the com­pany, its focus on qual­ity has opened doors to export to the United States.

Urzaiz cited the company’s track record of win­ning qual­ity awards, includ­ing a Gold Award for a medium-inten­sity blend of Changlot Reial, Picual, Hojiblanca, Cornicabra and Picudo olives at the 2025 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, as one of the rea­sons they were able to enter the lucra­tive North American mar­ket.

“The NYIOOC is always a good boost to all the effort that goes into bet­ting on qual­ity,” Urzaiz con­firmed. ​“It is also very inter­est­ing com­mer­cially for the U.S. mar­ket.”

The farm is also expand­ing its sales to other areas. ​“We want to reach every­one. This prod­uct deserves it. It’s slow, but we’re find­ing very loyal cus­tomers,” Urzaiz said.

To fine-tune its mod­ern pro­duc­tion tech­niques, the farm con­ducted an exten­sive trial with more than 70 olive vari­eties, ulti­mately select­ing 14 of them for the new groves.

“The ones best suited to the local envi­ron­ment and capa­ble of pro­duc­ing top-qual­ity oils were cho­sen,” Urzaiz noted, includ­ing Arbequina, Arbosana, Koroneiki, Manzanilla Cacereña and Arróniz.

Among the more recent exper­i­ments is the plant­ing of Lecciana olive trees, a cross between Leccino and Arbosana, devel­oped for resilience in a chang­ing cli­mate.

“For now, it rep­re­sents a small area, and we planted it because it seems a promis­ing vari­ety for pro­duc­ing qual­ity green fruity oils, and this is what we are look­ing for in Artajo,” Urzaiz said.

Today, Artajo cul­ti­vates more than 250,000 olive trees on 250 hectares.

“Ribera de Navarra is one of the areas of the Iberian Peninsula with the most hours of sun­shine per year,” Urzaiz said. ​“It is one of the north­ern­most areas for olive cul­ti­va­tion, with a con­trast­ing cli­mate and great poten­tial for pro­duc­ing aro­matic char­ac­ter and bal­anced yields in our olives.”

According to the farm, its organic and regen­er­a­tive approach shapes the company’s oper­a­tions.

“Artajo embraced organic farm­ing to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment and pro­duce healthy and safe food,” Urzaiz said. 

However, adopt­ing organic cul­ti­va­tion and pro­duc­tion meth­ods has come with a cost.

“Challenges are increased labor and costs,” Urzaiz said. ​“There is a pop­u­lar belief accord­ing to which ​‘organic’ is the same as ​‘aban­doned.’”

“It is quite the oppo­site. It’s about doing a lot of small things,” she added. ​“And the oppor­tu­ni­ties are prod­uct dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and meet­ing the grow­ing con­sumer demand for sus­tain­able and organic goods.” 

“We are doing organic pro­duc­tion to offer a qual­ity prod­uct that also offers safety,” Urzaiz noted. ​“If that is valu­able to the con­sumer, all the bet­ter.”

Artajo’s organic approach includes ini­tia­tives such as plant­ing flower bor­ders and cre­at­ing insect hotels, amphib­ian ponds and float­ing islands in irri­ga­tion basins to encour­age bio­di­ver­sity. 

Additionally, they have installed more than two dozen wooden nest boxes to attract birds and bats that help con­trol pests nat­u­rally. 

Terrace farm­ing, cover crops and prun­ing residues pro­tect soil struc­ture and mois­ture while cur­tail­ing ero­sion. 

According to Urzaiz, the olive trees cap­ture car­bon year-round, and veg­e­ta­tive cover improves soil organic mat­ter, con­tribut­ing to a neg­a­tive car­bon foot­print.

Artajo has also adopted mod­ern tech­nol­ogy from the out­set of the new cul­ti­va­tion, and today, weather sta­tions and real-time mois­ture sen­sors enable smart drip irri­ga­tion. 

“We rely on tech­nol­ogy and pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture to opti­mize resources such as humid­ity sen­sors. They tell us the sta­tus of each irri­ga­tion sec­tor on the farm in real time,” Huguet said.

The farm is also using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to mon­i­tor the con­di­tions of the olive trees across the estate.

Such mon­i­tor­ing sup­ports pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture inter­ven­tions such as irri­ga­tion and fer­til­iza­tion. It can also show early signs of stress, allow­ing a prompt response.

Water drawn from the nearby Lodosa canal is stored in reser­voirs and used strate­gi­cally to ensure the cor­rect amount of water for each tree.

Renewable energy pow­ers much of the estate. Olive pits fuel a bio­mass boiler that sup­plies heat­ing and hot water to the mill and other facil­i­ties. 

“We also gen­er­ate solar energy to pump irri­ga­tion and refrig­er­ate the cel­lar,” Urzaiz said.

Such tech­nol­ogy also strength­ens the far­m’s efforts to adapt to cli­mate change, which tends to impact the vol­ume of yields.

“In recent years, we’ve seen our har­vests seri­ously com­pro­mised, whether due to extreme heat dur­ing flow­er­ing, peri­ods of drought or rather extreme storms,” she noted.

With sev­eral olive oil tourism ini­tia­tives, the estate offers vis­i­tors oppor­tu­ni­ties to explore olive oil pro­duc­tion, learn how to appre­ci­ate the taste of olive oil, and deepen their under­stand­ing of qual­ity and polyphe­nols.

According to Urzaiz, con­sumer edu­ca­tion is essen­tial for the growth of the olive oil sec­tor.

“Right now, there’s still a lot of out­reach work to be done,” she said. ​“Spain con­sumes a lot of olive oil, but many peo­ple still don’t know what extra vir­gin means.”

At Los Llanos, vis­i­tors can book guided tours, tast­ings, express vis­its or pic­nics among the olive trees. Motorhome trav­el­ers can stay overnight. 

“We’re on a long road and part of oleo­tourism is rais­ing con­sumer aware­ness about our ​‘trea­sure,’” Urzaiz con­cluded.