This picture was taken from our room in La Iruela, just an olive stone throw from Cazorla.  We drove from south of Granada to Cazorla today through olives.  It was 360kms.  Nothing but an olive did we see.  All I can say is that they better not get anything wrong with them!

Monoculture!   I thought we had big stands of pine trees.  Well. Our pine trees have nothing on Spain’s olives.  I mean.  We just took one route.  Imagine how many more olives there are than what we saw.  What was the worst for me is that underneath probably 95% of these olives there is NOTHING.  Mainly the ground has been cultivated with either tractor or rotary hoe depending on the terrain.  But in many cases it has been sprayed off, probably for decades.  There’s nothing for the bees.I would really like to hear from someone in our olive industry to learn more about this.  I haven’t looked up olive pollination, diseases etc but would like to know more.   There were many patches where it appeared that the olives had been affected by some type of air borne fungus disease and parts of the olive trees had died out.  They sure wouldn’t want it to spread.  It’s something for me to check out when I’m home.