A Forgotten Treasure: Making Oil from Wild Olives

Ancient Greeks used their branches to weave their Olympic wreaths and Roman emper­ors are said to have kept aside the oil from its fruits for their per­sonal use. But for most of the cen­turies, feral olive trees were just for­got­ten in the bushes.

These small-leafed, poor rel­a­tives of the cul­ti­vated olive trees, were often left aside, its tiny fruits regarded as not prof­itable enough to be har­vested. This hap­pens even nowa­days. An aver­age of 4 to 6kg of olives are needed to pro­duce a liter of oil from com­mer­cial vari­eties, whereas for wild olive trees this amount increases to 15 – 20kg.

Thus, cul­ti­vated olive trees, with a much higher yield, dom­i­nate olive oil pro­duc­tion. However, some pro­duc­ers are start­ing to turn their eyes to this kind of widely neglected olive tree.

“Of course, there is great qual­ity olive oil from cul­ti­vated olives. We also have it. But the oil from wild olive trees has a par­tic­u­lar fla­vor, a dif­fer­ent taste. When you take it to a tast­ing panel, pro­fes­sional tasters don’t know how to describe it,” says Francisco Villanueva, co-founder of Aceite Mudéjar, a fam­ily-run com­pany that pro­duces this par­tic­u­lar kind of oil.

We meet him and his part­ner, Fernando Martín, at the doors of their olive oil mill in Monda, some 40km south­west of Málaga, in Andalusia.

“When some­one asks me how it tastes like, I always say it is like giv­ing a bite to the moun­tain. It tastes as wild Nature,” he tells Olive Oil Times.

But the fla­vor is not the only rea­son that is mak­ing oil of feral olive trees com­mer­cially viable.

“There is a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence in terms of organolep­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics, but its com­po­si­tion is dif­fer­ent as well. It has, of course, the same fatty acids, but regard­ing phe­no­lic com­pounds and vit­a­min E, it has a much big­ger share of them. When we send a sam­ple to spe­cial­ized labs, they ask us where we got this oil from. They find this unusual amount of antiox­i­dants,” says Villanueva, who is also a doc­tor.

Those char­ac­ter­is­tics have made the oil an appre­ci­ated cos­metic and med­i­c­i­nal com­pound.

In Spanish, feral olive trees are called ace­buches and their fruits are known as ​“ace­buchi­nas.”

Both words have Arabic and Berber ori­gins, a legacy of the century’s long Moorish past of the region.

Villanueva and his part­ner Fernando Martín began to pro­duce ace­buche oil just a few years ago when they started har­vest­ing the ace­buchi­nas grow­ing on the green slopes of the Sierra de las Nieves (lit­er­ally ​“range of the snows”).

This UNESCO bios­phere reserve, halfway between Málaga and Marbella, seems ages away from the hus­tle and bus­tle of the tourist cen­ters of the Costal del Sol. It is an ideal ter­ri­tory for ​“ace­buches.”

But oils from feral olive trees are also being pro­duced else­where, from Cádiz, at the Southernmost cor­ner of Spain, to Jaén, in cen­tral Andalusia, and the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, where ace­buches are called ​“ullas­tres” in Catalan lan­guage.

“There are many kinds of ace­buches. Some of them are sons of cul­ti­vated vari­eties. Their fruits are a bit more sim­i­lar to those of cul­ti­vated vari­eties. Others are grand­sons of great-grand­sons of ace­buches. Those are the truly rich ones to get ​‘ace­buchina’ oil from them,” explains Villanueva.

Size is the main exter­nal dif­fer­ence between cul­ti­vated olives and feral ones. ​“Acebuchinas” are much smaller and they have a higher pro­por­tion of olive pit.

The color of their pulps is also dif­fer­ent. While cul­ti­vated olives have a whitish pur­ple flesh, ace­buchi­nas have an intense blood-like juice.

The result is a com­pletely diverse type of oil. One that has per­haps been for­got­ten for too long. As Villanueva puts it: ​“If Roman emper­ors used it, why not us?.”