The black pigs grow up outdoors for more than a year, eating acorns, figs and carob.
Biel Oliver has raised Mallorcan black pigs in Porreres since 1994, as his father did before him. The pigs roam free among carob, fig and holm oak trees. Biel is fifty-eight and his hands show it.
His daughter Xisca spent ten years on the front desk of a hotel in Palma. Every day she watched German guests ask for sobrasada at breakfast. It was hardly ever black pig. In 2021 she left the hotel and came back to the farm.
The breed had all but disappeared and few people on the island still raise it. Xisca says every piece that leaves Porreres makes one more black pig worth raising. Biel says less and she translates.
