ANN HARVESTING OLIVES BY HAND
My husband and I own a 22 acre olive farm. Yes, you read that right! We have 850 of the things, not to mention vegetable gardens, cherry trees, walnut trees, almond trees and chestnut trees.
All need tending, pruning and harvesting, so we spend a considerable amount of time outdoors, rain or shine.
Despite the fact that this seems like an odd thing for two former IT people to do, it was actually in our plan from the beginning. Both of us had spent far too long in offices, in meetings, on planes. So spending more time outdoors seemed like heaven to us!
OK, so we didn’t really realise how much work it entailed to run a small farm (or is it more of a large smallholding?) We had in mind a bit of languid weeding, a fun olive harvest in Spain on a cool, bright winter’s day. We perhaps didn’t bargain on the cold, misty days that are typical of a Yunquera winter’s day, but hey, life’s an adventure, right?
So here we were, ensconced in our house on the mountain, and ready to begin work. The first chore was to prune the olive trees. We were discussing it, as is the norm, in the ‘old guys’ bar in the village.
“Have you pruned your trees yet?” we were asked.
“No,” says Kenton, “we are starting on Monday.”
The old guys look around – as in “who is the ‘we’ in ‘we’, Kenton?”
“The two of us,” says Kenton. “My wife and I.”
The shock was palpable.
“NO! Women do not work in the campo here,” say the men.
ANN HARVESTING ORANGES
Of course, there is no real reason for this – but certainly it is a fact that women don’t work in the campo. An older friend says she used to help pick olives in the early days of their marriage, but that things had changed (“for the better,” she said).
Then we moved on to the orange harvest, helping a friend to collect his oranges. It is hard, hot, dirty work. After picking for the day, we drove back through town to pick up some groceries, and met the lady who does my hair. In Yunquera, you never just wave as you drive by, you must stop for a chat.
My friend Ana Maria looked at me in horror and said: “Ana, que sucio!”, which indeed was true – I was filthy, head to toe.
Not The Done Thing!
Eight years later, and it is now accepted that Kenton and I work side by side in the campo, doing all the work on the land together (he also does much of the cooking and cleaning, but I’m too much of a coward to tell our Spanish friends that!). They see us bringing our sacks of olives to the mill. Chestnuts to the co-operative. Crates of vegetables for our friends. Me, in work clothes and boots, usually none too clean.
Eventually they have decided this is ok – probably because we are foreign and expected to have odd customs. So they have decided that I am a ‘hard worker’ – which is about the highest compliment possible in Yunquera…
Ann Larson – Culture Spain
Ann is American, lives at Casa Tyr in Andalusia with her husband and runs a farm, whilst making Yunquera Gold olive oil and Lujos handmade soaps and natural skincare products. Ann has lived for many years in Spain, knows the country and its people intimately and writes about the reality of living in Spain and how Spanish culture affects the lives of women in Spain.