Give an olive tree for Christmas and save a little piece of town
This year has been quite unusual in many aspects, but if we have learned anything from the pandemic and confinement, it is to value the small everyday details and to recover lifelong habits that we thought were forgotten , how to make biscuits or go back to town . Suddenly, we have stopped looking only outwards when looking for new travel destinations and have discovered real gems close to home in emptied Spain.
If you want to contribute your grain of sand this Christmas to combat depopulation, and incidentally help the environment , you can contribute giving an olive tree via Sponsor an olive tree , a project that intends to recover one hundred thousand ancient olive trees from the Teruel town of Oliet e, and which has become an economic and social engine for the town, as well as a benchmark for sustainability.
Sponsor an olive tree and help recover ancient olive trees
With a contribution from €50 a year you can choose your olive tree, baptize it and visit it whenever you want . In return, You will receive two liters of olive oil per year and the satisfaction of having collaborated with an initiative whose product meets the famous 4S: Sustainable, Social, Solidarity and Healthy . In fact, his Gourmet Extra Virgin olive oil has received the Award for the Best Oil of Bajo Aragón 2020 that grants the Denomination of Origin Oil of Bajo Aragón.
By sponsoring yourself, or gifting sponsorship to someone, you support the recovery of the Oliete olive grove and you promote a very positive environmental and social effect, since this project gives work to farmers and oil producers in the area and also helps members of ATADI, the Turolense Association of Associations of People with Intellectual Disabilities, which collaborates in the work recovery of the olive grove.
Help to recover the life of the town of Oliete
A BIT OF HISTORY
The rural exodus of young people from Oliete and the lack of business projects that fixed the population to the territory made the inhabitants, when leaving, they will leave the olive trees . When an olive tree falls into oblivion it is victim of the "branches" or "chitos" (as they say in Teruel) , some branches that are born at the base of the trunk and that feed on the resources of the tree until it is dry and lifeless.
In 2014, godparents, godmothers, farmers and a people wanting to survive and reinvent themselves came together to recover 100,000 abandoned olive trees. Alberto Alfonso and José Alfredo Martín are co-founders of this project and we have been told that, in just over five years, 10,000 olive trees have been sponsored and 10 people have been hired full time and 5 more temporarily . Just two years after the start of this initiative, in 2016, the first social mill was built, decorated by Boa Mistura and preventing the closure of the local school.
Alberto Alfonso explains that they started this project “with great enthusiasm and desire, giving life to an idea of entrepreneurship to recover our centenarian giants, applying innovation, creativity and digital tools to involve godmothers and godfathers from all over the world, who have become in the authentic heroes of change”. His idea was get a comprehensive experience with sponsorship " that " will emotionally connect the godmothers and godfathers with their olive trees ”, so so that they could follow the evolution of their “sponsored person” at all times, they created the app ‘My Olive Tree’.
For its part, Jose Alfredo Martin He adds that with this recovery they achieved “ give life to the town, employ people with different abilities and in socio-labour exclusion and protect and conserve these olive trees in a land stewardship model ”. For him, it is a great achievement to have created the oil brand 'Mi Olivo', because it provides "new social, sustainable and supportive approaches in a sector as traditional and competitive as oil"; and because " has inspired other peoples to think that change is possible so that new initiatives are born in the territory”.
OLIVE TREES WITH A FUTURE, TOURISM AND FAMOUS GODPARENTS
Although they feel "very proud" of having given life back to more than 10,000 centenary olive trees, that were abandoned, and having prevented the closure of the Oliete school by attracting new families to the town, they are still not satisfied. Alberto Alfonso assures that his objective is “to recover all of the abandoned olive trees of Oliete and extend our entrepreneurship model to other towns so that they value their endogenous resources”.
Since the beginning of the project, many people have wanted to join this cause and thus contribute to giving visibility to 'Sponsor an olive tree'. Some of the best known collaborators are Anna Castillo, Elvira Sastre, Albert Adrià and Icíar Bollaín , but there are many more anonymous benefactors who have done their part to rescue their little piece of Oliete.
In fact, they are already more than 15,000 people who have come to meet their sponsored olive tree in situ and, incidentally, enjoy the Iberian and Mudejar heritage of this town and its natural environment . Within the municipality are the Iberian settlements of Palomar and Cabezo de San Pedro , the cave paintings of the Frontón de la Tía Chula , which in 1998 were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO; and the Sima de San Pedro, a well over a hundred meters deep with a lake at the bottom, which houses one of the most unique ecosystems in the region, with more than 25 animal species.