White villages and towns, sea, red earth, masserie (large farms), dry stone walls and olive groves. This is what you find in Apulia, almost always. But it is in the Piana degli Ulivi, a portion of land between Ostuni, Fasano, Monopoli and Carovigno, that the highest concentration of thousand-year-old olive trees can be found. 3,000-year-old trees, dating back to the time of the ancient Messapi, with their twisted and bizarre trunks, and immersed in masserie and hypogean oil mills that bear witness to the ancient oil culture in Puglia.An evocative landscape that can be discovered along paths, sheep-tracks and ancient rural roads.
Puglia produces about 40% of all of Italy’s olive oil, with an estimated 60 million olive trees, including some extraordinarily ancient ones.
A matter of taste.
For a greener oil with a fruitier taste, the olives are picked (often the tree is shaken using machinery, with the olives falling into netting surrounding the base of the tree, like an inverted umbrella) when they are around 40-60% ripe. Others let their olives drop and harvest them then for the golden, bitter, peppery oil that is prized here in Puglia. Olives are far too bitter to be eaten when harvested. They have to be cured. We do this in brine, or in salt. A process that takes an initial 10-40 days, and at least 3 months mellowing. Black olives are simply ripe olives that have turned from green to black.
But there is a threat to our olive trees. The xylella fastidiosa pathogen is real and devastating. Carried from tree to tree by the philaenus spumarius sap feeding insect it causes trees to dry out and die.
First discovered in the region a little over 5 years ago it is estimated that 10 million trees have been infected and destroyed, wiping out the livelihood of hundreds of olive farmers, some generations old.
Over 21 million olive trees in Puglia have been decimated by the Xylella bacteria over the last 11 years.
No collective solution exists to preserve the 350000 listed hundreds and thousands of years old olive trees from Ostuni to Monopoli.
Immediate action is required before it is too late to preserve this unique world heritage and to avoid an incalculable ecological, cultural and economic tragedy and the decimation of the world heritage that the thousand-year-old trees represent. There is a maximum of two years before all the trees are infected.