Casa da Amoreira

Municipality of Fundão, region of Castelo Branco, Portugal

The quinta.

The quinta sits in the municipality of Fundão, in Castelo Branco. Hard light, cold nights, and more rock in the ground than earth. Olives want exactly that.

A tall bottle resting in the fork of a lichen-covered olive tree
Granite soil, hard light, cold nights. The trees have had three hundred years to get used to it.
A bottle at the mossy foot of an ancient olive trunk

The trees

Three hundred years, and counting.

Seventy trees, some young and some very old. The oldest have been standing at least three hundred years and you cannot get your arms around them. The young ones were put in so there is still a grove here long after the old ones have gone.

The orchard

Everything else that grows here.

The olives are not the only thing growing. Cherries, oranges, apples, pears, plums, figs and loquats — all of it eaten here. A quinta this size feeds itself first.

  • cherries
  • oranges
  • apples
  • pears
  • plums
  • figs
  • loquats
1.5 hectares the whole quinta
70 olive trees tended by hand
300+ years the oldest of them
2 varieties Galega and Cordovil
<100 litres a harvest, all of it
500 ml one bottle size, for now