Love Is Blind

This afternoon we headed to a traditional organic 3rd generation olive oil farm now run by Joao Rosado and his wife. His grandfather originally bought the land and planted olives as a way to supplement the family income. Over 3 generations, the family had simply farmed olives until Joao and his wife, both local school teachers, decided to venture into olive oil production.

The farm has 231 trees, including a few thousand year old ones, with the oldest being 2000 years old. Their annual production is 2000 bottles (400 litres) per year. They deliberately keep the number of trees low and rely on mother nature to increase the quality of the olives. The olives are harvested early (early Oct & still green) before they fully mature to produce the highest quality raw olive oil. They rely on family and friends during harvest to pick everything by hand. It does present some difficulty as they only have 8 hours between the picking of the olives and the time they are pressed.

We were presented with a homemade lunch prepared by his wife and then served by Joao and his daughters. We did a tasting of his olive oil, which is called "Love Is Blind"

This is not a regular tourist attraction as they only do limited tours that fit into their teaching schedule, so we all felt very lucky to have had this experience. We also got to meet their family dog "Olive" who greeted us, zipping around wanting pets from everyone 😊

The last stop of the day was the Cork Factory, where we got to see how cork is processed and manufactured into various products. We learned about the harvesting, boiling, and the pressing stages of cork.Read more