In December each tree is stripped by hand, branch by branch, onto sheets laid on the ground.
Marta Pallarés teaches at the school in Valderrobres and Lluís Ferràs is an electrician. In 2016 they inherited her grandmother's plot: three hectares with 35 olive trees more than a thousand years old. Some of them were already standing when the village castle went up.
In the first few years they nearly sold it. Each tree gives very little and no machine fits between those trunks. One winter they picked the olives by hand with the cousins and had them milled on their own. They got a thousand bottles and every one was gone by the sixth of January.
Now they do it every December at weekends, with anyone who wants to come up and help. Marta says that if nobody picks them, these trees end up as an entry in a catalogue and nothing more. Every numbered bottle is a tree that is still giving.
