SUR joined a group of pickers on a farm near Campillos one cold, early morning with a lot of hard work ahead
The Mediterranean is synonymous with olive trees and in ancient times they were considered sacred and in Athens destroying them was a crime. An old, gnarled olive tree has a mystical aura. The oldest one, supposedly found in Crete, is at least 2,000 years old and it still bears fruit.
Antonio Olmo is somewhat younger; his identity card says he was born in the 1970s. Any bullfighter would be proud of his sideburns; they are long and stick out of a cap that will later protect him from the sun. He walks with a firm, determined stride, in a hurry to get to the next tree.
Antonio's hands are rough and have more grip than some tyres. He still has time to put together a cigarette with rolling tobacco and take a lighter out of his pocket. He lights it, inhales and exhales. In that order. The road surface is wet and frosty. From a bird's eye view, it looks like a thin layer of icing sugar. "Real cold", he says, "is feeling your fingers and toes ache". A lesson he learned as a child. "The first time I picked olives I was twelve years old. My first salary was 2,400 pesetas" (around 12 euros). "I was still picking olives off the ground", he recalls.
Antonio is accompanied by another young man from Campillos, 29-year-old Iván Leal. He puts his hands over his mouth to warm up, then says that working in the fields is seen by many as a failure in life.
The third member of the group is Benito Avilés. He drives a tractor with heating and a radio. The John Deere is fitted with a giant clamp and a kind of umbrella that opens and closes at the touch of a button. It seems that olive harvesting has also found its own industrial revolution in machinery.
The exact timing, as always, is determined by the field. Each olive is initially pale, almost white, and then green. Only when ripe does it turn black. For centuries, this colour has indicated that it was time to harvest the small, hard fruits and take them to the oil mill. Now is the time.
The farmhouse does not appear on any GPS system. As we approach, what sounded like a pack of dogs turns out to be one Breton and a mastiff who, as they approach, wag their tails in peace.
At 7am all that can be seen as far as the eye can see are olive trees and more olive trees. They look like toy soldiers in military formation, anchored on ochre-coloured earth. The landscape is monotonous and has a soothing effect on the senses.
Benito knows all about olive trees and knows the flavour of the land they come from because that is where his ancestors lie, now part of it. He likes to say things like "the countryside is like that" or "life in the countryside has its good things and its bad things". Her favourite phrase is: "Olive trees are like water, without them there is no life. There would be no one left in the villages".
At 8am the tractor enters the olive grove like a miner in an underground tunnel. Antonio and Iván accompany on foot. In the past, heavy bundles had to be placed under the tree to pick the fruit. The more physical part is now taken care of by machinery. At the end of the seven-hour day's work (with a 30-minute break), they receive a wage of 70 euros. "We work from Monday to Saturday, as long as it doesn't rain," explains Iván. In a week without any bad weather he earns 420 euros.
"The important thing to stay on the pitch is to have a good head," Benito insists. More than once he has seen promising youngsters come to him eager to work. Then the weekend would come and they would drink their earnings. "The following Monday, they wouldn't come", he says.
That is why he has so much faith in Iván and wants to teach him everything he knows about olives. The young man hardly ever goes out at night and his passions are sport and playing in the municipal band of Campillos.
Behind every move in olive harvesting there is first a lesson. "It's not about hitting the tree with sticks. If you do that, you cut the branches and each branch is worth money. It's more like a gentle accompaniment," says Benito and rotates his shoulders to simulate the movement with his hands.
The sun rises higher in the sky. At first it peeps out timidly and the air is still freezing. Gradually, the frost begins to disappear. The aromas increase as the thermometer rises. The atmosphere is now strongly perfumed, smelling of sage and rosemary. The light filters faintly and milky through the olive grove.
A risk appears: romanticising a job that is still very hard and punishing for the body. Herniated discs are a common ailment that haunts many farm workers at some point. "It's hard and very honest, what you earn you have earned in an honest way", says Antonio.
Most of the population of the small villages in the Antequera area depends on olive cultivation for their livelihood. As many only work during the harvest, the unemployment rate remains high. There are still large landowners' farms, although many have disappeared. Hard work persists. Asked if he feels exploited for bending his back for someone who once would have been identified as a señorito, Antonio reflects: "The system is like that. We're all slaves to something, even if you're sitting in an office, right?
The day progresses and with repetitive constancy, some 300 olive trees have already been harvested. The fruit is dumped from the giant umbrella into a trailer. It will be unloaded at the end of the day. The Campillos cooperative, the economic heart of the area, pumps blood to all the surrounding villages. Labour in the countryside is a lot like dominoes. One domino falls and pulls the next, setting in motion a fateful cascade that nobody knows quite how to stop. The domino that knocks over all the others here is drought. "The rains this spring have given us a break," explains Benito. The Junta de Andalucía estimates a crop of 305,000 tonnes in the province of Malaga, 54.8 per cent more than last year.
Today there are no clouds and the team can see that today is one of those days in the countryside when they feel "grateful". In reality, Benito points out, days like today are an exception and that December and January are particularly hard. If all goes well, he will be able to offer his people work until April or May.