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.
The García Retamal family bought Campo Santa Eliana in 1982, fifty hectares of coastal dryland at Guarilihue, in the commune of Coelemu, on the road that joins Route 126 to the Guarilihue sector in what is now Chile's Ñuble region, within the Itata valley. Vineyards came with the land. Francisco García Retamal took the property on from his parents in 2004 and noticed that the older olive trees already standing there fruited heavily year after year with nobody tending them. In 2010 he planted 250 Arbequina, which is where the oil starts.
Twelve hectares are now under olives, Arbequina, Frantoio and Picual, with about eight hectares left as native forest of oak, notro and Chilean hazel. Water comes from the Guarilihue stream and from underground aquifers, carried roughly a kilometre by gravity and then dripped tree by tree. Picking is by hand and the oil is cold extracted.
The Frantoio has done most of the travelling. At L'Orciolo d'Oro in Italy it took Silver in 2019, second place in 2020, the intense fruity class in 2021 with a score of 99.98 out of 100, and best monocultivar in 2023 for the 2022 harvest. The Arbequina won first place at the same competition in 2020, having already taken a Gran Prestigio Oro at Olivinus in Argentina in 2017. In Chile, Guía Oliva named the Frantoio its 2019 revelation at 96 points and the Arbequina best monovarietal in 2020 at 95.
From the public record: puertasdeguarilihue.cl
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.
