Apadrina un olivo

Apadrinaunolivo.org (‘Adopt an olive tree’) is a social initiative set up by a group of young entrepreneurs to restore, through online sponsorship, the abandoned olive groves of Oliete (Teruel), a village hit hard by rural depopulation. Around 70% of the area’s olive groves, centuries old and producing high-quality oil, had been abandoned.

The initiative set out to restore 100,000 olive trees. In its first two years it had restored 4,500 and created three full-time farming jobs. It also planned to build an oil mill in Oliete to involve all the local farmers, presented as the world’s first solidarity-based, social and sustainable oil mill.

The project led to the first academic studies and a doctoral thesis evaluating it.