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Having once faced certain death, many of these trees are worth their weight in gold and are exported to Dubai, China, Australia, Germany, Spain and Morocco. Luís Piedade, managing partner of the Ecossistemas garden centre, told the Lusa agency that people buy olive trees by the truckload which go all over Spain, mainly to Alicante and Murcia; he added that 70% of this business goes to the Spanish market.
Export of olive and carob trees expanding Luís Piedade said that the export of olive and carob trees (trees that are not protected, unlike the cork oak) was expanding and although people in Spain came to get the trees directly, the internet has been one of the other solutions that has been found to do business with Dubai, China and Australia. While the European Union is giving Portugal funds to cut down hundred-year-old olive trees and replace them with olive groves for intensive cultivation which can produce olives more than once a year, thousands of olive trees, but also carob trees and strawberry trees, are saved before the work begins, to be sold later. Luís Piedade told the Lusa agency that they had contacted the company building the Via do Infante motorway (Algarve) and the Alqueva dam (Alentejo) and they had kept the olive and carob trees alive by transplanting them, otherwise they would have been cut down during the building of these infrastructure projects. Four-metre, hundred-year-old carob tree worth 2,500 euros Rui Piedade said that they had watered and fertilised them, had cared for them, sprayed them with insecticides and fungicides and they had come back to life. As he spoke, he looked up at a carob tree measuring over four metres in height and more than a hundred years old and which is priced at 2,500 for sale to the public. Many trees from the motorway and the Alqueva dam are now living in luxury developments in the Algarve such as the Sheraton group's Pine Cliffs, Penina at Quinta do Lago and at Quinta da Boa Vista in Praia da Luz in Lagos. The hotel groups do not shy away from handing over between five and six thousand euros for an ancient olive tree transplanted and rescued from the Via Infante de Sagres (A22) or 2,500 euros for a hundred-year-old carob tree, the managing partner disclosed. Algarve golf courses and the gardens of international footballers, of comedians, Portuguese actors and even of Presidents of the Republic of Portugal have had trees from Ecossistemas. The house of that hallowed band Simple Minds in Praia da Luz, meanwhile sold to a Portuguese person, has also had trees and plants from the Algarve company that has been operating since 1988. Olive trees that are 20 and 30 years old and cost 200 euros are also much in demand for private gardens, Luís Piedade said proudly. source: Algarve Observer |
