Olive Auction built this page from public records so buyers can find the estate. Its own people can claim it at no cost — complete the story, list lots, answer buyers.
After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
Oro del Desierto grows olives in the Tabernas Desert, in Almería, where the Alonso family traces seven generations of independent farming: dryland cereal, sheep and goats, almonds and capers. That changed course in 1995, when Rafael Alonso returned to agriculture; in 1996 he took on the inherited family plot, which already carried almonds, vines and dryland olives, and planted a new organic grove on it. He then bought an abandoned oil mill dating from 1925, derelict since the 1970s with its original parts still inside, restored the building and installed a working mill, a restaurant and a museum for the old machinery. The company Rafael Alonso Aguilera S.L. was founded in 1999, and trading began in 2000.
The grove is farmed organically on terraces and contour lines, with cover crops grazed by horses and sheep, alperujo composted back into the soil and olive stones burnt as fuel in the mill, which runs with the grove entirely on photovoltaic power. Tabernas gives more than 3,000 hours of sun a year without sharp temperature swings, and the fruit is cold-extracted within eight hours of picking.
In 2019 AEMO, the Spanish association of olive-growing municipalities, named it the best olive mill in Spain, and the NYIOOC in New York gave gold to both the Coupage and the Picual. In 2023 AEMO and Deoleo awarded the farm first prize for the best environmental management of olive groves in Spain, the jury describing some 100 hectares of organic grove.
From the public record: blog.orodeldesierto.com · orodeldesierto.com
A producer account takes a minute — name, mill, region. We attach this profile the same day.
Lab numbers, tree references, harvest dates, a photo — the tap-through form asks only for what buyers pay for.
Auction with a confidential reserve, or a fixed-price allocation. We review it and it goes live.
The catalogue goes to this list before it goes on the site. When the sale closes you get every hammer price from it — including the ones that disappointed.
Two emails. Then quiet until Sale No. 2.
