Sixteen territories, told properly

Territori del Sénia

Where the borders of Valencia, Catalonia and Aragón meet, twenty-seven municipalities keep a shared register of trees old enough to predate the borders themselves.

The Taula del Sénia territory spans fifteen Valencian municipalities, nine Catalan and three Aragonese, from coastal Vinaròs to Beceite and Valderrobres in the Aragonese hills. A tree earns its place on the register once its trunk measures more than 3.50 metres in perimeter at 1.30 metres height. The Mancomunitat Taula del Sénia and Asociación Territorio Sénia have run the count since 2008-09, dated by Professor Antonio Prieto of Madrid's Polytechnic University. The catalogue has grown with every survey: 4,080 trees in the first count, 5,767 kept current, 6,358 in the press consensus now circulating, and claims of over 7,000 at the loosest. FAO named the territory a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2018.

The concentration sits overwhelmingly in a handful of towns. Ulldecona alone holds 1,524 catalogued trees, the largest concentration in any single municipality. Canet lo Roig has catalogued 1,115, more than the 760 people who live there. La Jana counts 966 across roughly fifty trees per square kilometre, the highest density in the territory. Numbers fall away after that: Traiguera 589, Cervera del Maestre 219, down to three specimens at Peñarroya de Tastavins, the highest-altitude trees in the register.

Two groves stand as open-air museums. The Museu Natural de l'Arión in Ulldecona holds thirty-five millennial trees on a hectare beside the Via Augusta, among them La Farga de l'Arión, an 8.03-metre trunk attributed to a planting around 314CE and held to be the oldest attributed tree in Iberia. The Museu Natural del Pou del Mas in la Jana keeps twenty-one trees with free access, including La Farga del Pou del Mas, attributed to roughly 833CE.

The territory has come to dominate AEMO, Spain's annual contest for monumental olive, since Ulldecona's Farga de l'Arión won in 2007. Sénia trees have taken the title again in 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2021, 2024 and 2025, eight wins in total, more than any other territory has managed. Traiguera's Olivo de Sinfo, on the Via Augusta itself, added a separate honour in 2019: Recomed's best monumental olive of the Mediterranean.

Fourteen to seventeen producers hold the Farga Milenaria mark, working around 700 monumental trees under rules fixing acidity at or below 0.6, audited by Norma Agrícola in Valencia. A further 349 guarantee-mark trees stand outside the core territory, in Alcora, Amposta, Figueroles, Masdenverge and Sant Mateu.

A lot from the Sénia carries its tree's catalogue number, GPS position and trunk perimeter on the dossier, and, where the miller holds the Farga Milenaria mark, a sworn acidity figure traced to that one still-standing trunk.

The Piana degli Ulivi Monumentali

Between Ostuni, Fasano and Monopoli, a regional law counts every ancient tree by hand, even as the disease that has reshaped Salento's groves moves steadily north.

Puglia's regional register held 343,738 monumental olives at its last official count in July 2021. Coldiretti put the press figure at 347,578 in 2023 and around 355,000 by 2024, some 250,000 within the Piana degli Ulivi Monumentali, the coastal plain between Ostuni, Fasano and Monopoli. None sit on Italy's national heritage-tree register, which under Law 10/2013 holds zero Puglia olives; the Piana runs entirely on the regional track of Regional Law 14/2007.

That law grants monumentality on one of three grounds: recognised historical or anthropological value, a trunk diameter of at least 100 centimetres, or 70 to 100 centimetres with other qualifying traits. An owner or council files a written scheda; the Commissione Tecnica's opinion, binding on any felling or relocation, leads to a provisional decree in the regional bulletin, thirty days for objections, then a definitive decree. The working register lives as a GIS layer on the regional planning portal, sit.puglia.it, an internal tool with no public search interface.

Two apps sit either side of that process and are constantly confused for each other. AppOlea is the citizen-reporting tool, the route by which an owner or a passer-by flags a tree for the census. App Ulìa is unrelated, a QR-code system tracing a bottle back to the specific tree its oil was pressed from.

The masserie carry the working memory of the numbers. Masseria Brancati, outside Ostuni, claims over 1,000 monumental specimens on 30 hectares, 800 formally registered, and presses Ogliarola alongside Coratina; its Grande Vecchio tree is put at some 3,000 years, never formally dated. At Fasano, Masseria Appia Traiana runs an adoption scheme delivering twelve litres a year per sponsored tree, from a claimed 4,500 trees.

South of the plain, Xylella fastidiosa has spread in a patchwork beyond its old containment line. The Salento core zone had its buffer cut from five kilometres to two in November 2024, while new outbreaks through 2025 reached as far as Gargano's Cagnano Varano and, by January 2026, Valenzano, putting the bacterium in all six Puglia provinces. More than 2.6 million trees have been uprooted; the University of Bari puts annual profitability losses at €132 million, near €3 billion since 2013. Replanting leans on resistant cultivars: Leccino and FS-17/Favolosa already established, Lecciana and Leccio del Corno added in 2024, though funds have processed only 440 of 9,000 applications.

A lot from the Piana carries its tree's DGR registration number and GIS position on the dossier and, this far north of Salento, a phytosanitary note confirming the grove has tested clear of Xylella fastidiosa.

Crete

Two grafted trunks, one at each end of the island, anchor Crete's claim to Europe's oldest continuously worked olives, though no ring count has ever settled a date on either.

At Ano Vouves, in the Kolymvari district of Chania, the Olive Tree of Vouves carries a trunk perimeter of 12.5 metres and a diameter of 4.6 metres. Claimed ages run from 2,000 to 5,000 years; the ring floor sits nearer 2,000, and most accounts settle on something close to 3,000. Wild rootstock was grafted with the Tsounati variety long ago, and the tree was declared a Natural Monument by regional decision in February 1997. A museum has stood on-site since October 2009, drawing some 20,000 visitors a year; the tree supplied wreath branches for the Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 Olympics.

At Kavousi, in Ierapetra district on the other side of the island, the Olive of Azorias measures 4.9 metres across and 14.20 metres around. Ring counts place its planting somewhere around 1350 to 1100 BCE, an attributed age near 3,100 to 3,370 years. It too is a graft, the mastoeidis variety worked onto wild rootstock, among the oldest surviving grafts in cultivation anywhere. Its wreath went to the winner of the first Olympic women's marathon, run in Athens in 2004.

Both trees survive on the same principle: a wild oleaster provides the rootstock, and a cultivated variety grafted onto it carries fruiting wood that renews itself for centuries while the trunk beneath continues to hollow and grow. That hollowing is why no dating method has closed the gap between a 2,000-year floor and a 5,000-year claim.

Chania's Kolymvari PDO contains Vouves and runs largely on Koroneiki, even though Vouves itself is Tsounati; the district presses around 90,000 tonnes of olives a year, close to 90 per cent of it extra virgin. Sitia PDO, in Lasithi, spans 47 villages and quotes a maximum acidity of 0.2 per cent, with cultivation claims reaching to Minoan times. No single national law protects Greek heritage trees; protection runs through prefecture and regional decrees issued tree by tree, coordinated across the island by SEDIK, the association of Cretan olive municipalities. Producers trade on both trees by name: Terra Elaia bottles oils called after each grove directly, while one Kolymvari label markets "3,000-year-old trees" in retail copy its own producer site does not repeat, dating the grove instead to the Venetian era.

A Cretan lot's dossier carries its PDO, its cultivar and any claimed line back to Vouves or Azorias stock as heritage attribution alone, since no certified age exists for a trunk that dating has never been able to close.

The Adriatic ancients

From a Pag Island grove of eighty thousand wild-grafted trees to a single trunk still hand-picked every October, the Adriatic keeps its ancient olives in active use.

On the northern tip of Pag Island, the Olive Gardens of Lun cover some 24 hectares with roughly 80,000 trees, most of them wild Olea oleaster grafted with cultivated wood centuries ago. Two specimens within the gardens carry names of their own: one attributed to around 2,000 years, confirmed by DNA as a single continuous tree, and a second put at about 1,600 years that still yields up to 300 kilograms of fruit. The cooperative Maslinarska zadruga Lun presses and sells the oil. The gardens sit inside a 23.6-hectare botanical reserve, the wider etno-zone protected since 1975, though not on Croatia's UNESCO tentative list.

Across the water in Brijuni National Park, a single tree on Veliki Brijun island was radiocarbon-dated by Zagreb's Ruđer Bošković Institute in the 1960s to roughly 1,600 years. It is still hand-picked every October, yielding about 30 kilograms of fruit that renders down to some 4.1 kilograms of oil, tested at 0.11 per cent free acidity and a peroxide value of 1.95. Storm damage from the 1970s was repaired with concrete, and a 2017 effort to brand the oil commercially with the University of Zagreb and the Palunko mill has yet to produce a settled retail line.

South along the coast, near Mirovica between Bar and Ulcinj, Stara Maslina was tested by Istanbul University's Forestry Faculty in 2015, which put its age at 2,240 years from tissue and growth-ring analysis; rounder figures of 2,242 to 2,250 circulate in the press. The tree carries a cultivar called Žutica and was declared a natural monument in either 1957 or 1963; sources disagree on which. Visitors pay a nominal €1, €0.50 for concessions; gates open 08:00 to 18:00. Concrete paving around its base was found in 2023 to trap water and cause dieback; drainage work has since brought new shoots. No bottle carries the tree's own name, but Bar producers working the same Žutica groves, among them Barsko Zlato and Uljara Lučka, sell commercially close by.

Istria supplies the region's working mills. At Vodnjan, Chiavalon presses five local varieties, Buža and Istarska bjelica among them, into ranges including Romano and Ex Albis, its organic half-litre retailing around €25. OIO Vivo, between Pula and Vodnjan, works 60 hectares and about 15,000 trees with its own tasting room.

The dossier for an Adriatic lot names the island or coastal comune of origin, the grafted cultivar, and, where testing exists, the radiocarbon or ring-count reading behind the tree's attributed age.

Istria

Croatia applied, Slovenia objected, and the peninsula came out of it with one cross-border designation over both halves and an older Slovene name still standing beside it.

Croatia lodged the application on 30 July 2015 as Istarsko ekstra djevičansko maslinovo ulje. Slovenia opposed by notice on 22 June 2016 and reasoned statement that August, arguing partial homonymy with Ekstra deviško oljčno olje Slovenske Istre, on the register since 2007. The agreement reached in consultation, communicated on 8 May 2017, cut the name back to Istra, enlarged the zone across Slovene Istria and turned a Croatian file into a two-country one. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/332 of 20 February 2019 registered Istra as a PDO.

The specification, filed as HR-PDO-0005-01358, admits eighteen varieties, twelve of them local: istarska belica, also written istarska bjelica or bianchera, then buža, rošinjola, črnica and žižolera among the others, and six Italian and French incomers. At least 80 per cent of any oil must come off that list, and 80 per cent from one variety for a monovarietal. Free acidity is capped at 0.4 per cent, peroxide at 12 meq O2/kg and K232 at 2.25; the median for fruity must exceed 3.0, bitterness and sharpness 2.0. Growing, milling and packing all happen inside a zone drawn from Port Preluk above Rijeka to Socerb on the Italian border.

The Slovene name came first. Commission Regulation (EC) No 148/2007 of 15 February 2007 registered Ekstra deviško oljčno olje Slovenske Istre for DOSI, the Slovene Istrian growers' society founded in 1992; Implementing Regulation (EU) No 1188/2014 then tightened it. Acidity fell to 0.3 per cent, peroxide to 7 mmol O2/kg, biophenols to at least 150 mg/kg by HPLC, the organoleptic score to 7.0 or better, and picking to mill from 48 hours to 24. Istrska belica must make 30 per cent of a blend, 80 per cent of a monovarietal. Containers hold five litres at most and cannot mix harvest years.

The working register is the Istria County tourist board's: 98 estates at istra.hr in four grades, four in a Hall of Fame, Chiavalon, Ipša, Mate, Olea B.B., above 18 Premium, 23 Excellent and 53 Recommended. Its tally of Flos Olei dates Istria's first listing to 2010 and counts nine years as the guide's best region in the world, 2016 to 2022, 2024 and 2026, against eight as second. The 2026 edition holds 68 Istrian growers, near 14 per cent of its 500 oils, 18 above 95 points.

The old record reaches to Rome. The Archaeological Museum of Istria places two senatorial amphora workshops in the early empire, Lorun near Tar under the consul Statilius Taurus Sisenna and Fažana near Pula under the consul Laecanius Bassus, both passing to the imperial fiscus under Vespasian, their stamps naming emperors down to Hadrian. The dossier cites amphorae marked Olei Histrici and Olei flos, and oil carried to Noricum and Pannonia. Recovery is recent: žižolera and rosulja went onto Croatia's variety list in 2007, as the Vodnjan grower Meloto records; the tourist board files rosulja under rošinjola, while the study cited in the dossier makes it a variety of its own.

A lot from Istria carries a PDO name, Istra from 2019 or the Slovene designation from 2007, the harvest year on the label, a numbered adhesive stamp bearing the common symbol in its Croatian ZOI or Slovene ZOP form, a varietal breakdown where documents support it, and acidity, peroxide and K-values read against the ceilings in the specification.

Bar–Ulcinj

An Istanbul forestry laboratory dated one trunk here to the year; the hundred thousand trees around it are held on no register at all.

Montenegro's old olive coast runs from Bar south to Ulcinj, and one cultivar holds it: Žutica, the yellow yield. The Centre for Subtropical Cultures in Bar puts Žutica at about 97 per cent of trees in the southern subarea of Ulcinj, Bar and Budva, against 36 per cent in Boka Kotorska. Everyone counting the trees counts differently: MONSTAT's 2012 census is quoted at 436,000 productive trees on 3,200 hectares; a 2017 study estimates half a million; the Bar and Ulcinj growers' associations claim 100,000 trees, 1,700 growers, twelve mills, up to 10,000 trees past a thousand years. Montenegro keeps no register of olive trees.

Stara Maslina stands at Mirovica, on the Bar–Ulcinj road. Across 2014 and 2015, under an EU-financed cluster project run by UNIDO with UNDP for the Ministry of Economy, cores were bored from fifty trees, twenty-five at Bar and twenty-five at Ulcinj, and read at the Wood Anatomy and Tree Ring Research Laboratory of the University of Istanbul's Faculty of Forestry. It gave Mirovica 2,240 years as of 2015, the figure the House of Olives publishes; the BBC's account of the study gives 2,014 to 2,480, and figures from 2,242 to 2,247 circulate elsewhere. Six of the fifty fell in the 1,000–2,000 band, two above. The House of Olives dates protection to a 1957 declaration of public good, which passed the tree to the Municipality of Bar; Bar's tourist board gives 1963, as a natural monument.

The statute is the Law on Olive Growing and Olive Oil, gazette 45/14 and 39/16. Article 2 makes groves a good of general interest and names three for special protection: Maslinada Valdanos at Ulcinj, Stara Maslina at Bar, Velja Maslina at Budva. Article 15 forbids felling or moving any olive over 100 years old. Growers above 0.1 hectares or fifty trees enter the Ministry's Register of Olive Growers, millers the Register of Producers; a miller pressing another's fruit must receipt the weight in and oil out.

Valdanos bay carries the older landscape: its beach became a category III natural monument in 1968, the grove behind holds 18,000 trees whose average age the record puts at 800 years, and on 17 January 1978 that same number, with 94,000 square metres, went to expropriation for a military base. Ulcinj's council counts 87,000 trees across 2,500 hectares in its maslinada; the agriculture ministry puts Valdanos alone at 80,000. Buzuku works 210 old Žutica trees here, its oldest put by the family at 1,314 years, undated.

Kuća maslina, the House of Olives, opened in Stari Bar in September 2024, a municipal company, took Stara Maslina under management by assembly decision, and runs MNEOOC, the national competition: first held in 2025, and in April 2026 awarding nine bronze, fourteen silver and thirteen gold for oil, judged by the Centre for Ecotoxicological Research and the Biotechnical Faculty's panel. Uljara Lučka and Barska uljara have both taken gold. The cluster's earlier brand, 42°N 19°E, bottled Žutica from the dated ancients.

A lot from this coast carries no tree number, since no register exists: what travels with it is the grove's Ministry register entry, the mill's statutory receipt for fruit in and oil out, an Istanbul Faculty of Forestry age certificate where one was issued, and, for oils entered at Stari Bar, an MNEOOC score with acidity and peroxide value beside it.

Kolymvari & Sitia

Crete's two flagship districts hold PDOs registered seven months apart, one rulebook rewritten twice since 2021 and the other never published at all.

Κολυμβάρι Χανίων Κρήτης sits in the Union register as PDO-GR-0053, added by Commission Regulation (EC) No 1065/97 of 12 June 1997 under the simplified Article 17 procedure, its footnotes refusing Χανίων and Κρήτης protection on their own. What the register holds is thin: an extra virgin oil at least 90 per cent Koroneiki, a zone given only as areas of the former Municipality of Kolymvari, ELGO-DEMETRA as authority. No single document, no summary sheet, no recognised producer group, no amendment in the twenty-nine years since. The municipality itself was abolished into Platanias in 2011, 149.99 square kilometres from Rodopou down to Vouves.

Σητεία Λασιθίου Κρήτης is PDO-GR-0052, registered seven months later by Commission Regulation (EC) No 134/98 of 20 January 1998. Ένωση Σητείας Α.Ε.Σ. applied to reopen it on 18 December 2019; Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/1762 of 30 September 2021 approved the result, cutting free acidity from 1.0 to 0.8 per cent oleic acid, adding limits the old text lacked — K232 ≤ 2.30, K268 ≤ 0.15, delta-K ≤ 0.005, peroxide ≤ 15, fruitiness median ≥ 3, bitterness and pungency ≤ 5, defect zero. A standard amendment dated 20 October 2025, published 14 January 2026, moved K232 to 2.50 and K268 to 0.18. The oil is exclusively Koroneiki, milled within 48 hours, malaxed strictly below 27°C, never carried in plastic sacks.

The 2021 text redrew the ground as well: the municipal units of Sitia, Analipsi, Itanos and Lefki plus the communities of Agios Stefanos, Stavrochori and Orino in Makry Gialos, reassembling the old province of Sitia after Lithines and Orino were left out at registration under Kapodistrias, Law 2539/1997, Kallikratis moving the lines again in 2010. No village list appears in the specification.

Ένωση Αγροτικών Συνεταιρισμών Σητείας was founded in 1933 over 42 primary co-operatives and some 8,700 members, became an agricultural corporate partnership in 2014 resting on fourteen of them, and bottles through Έλαια Σητείας – LaSitia. It puts the district at three million Koroneiki trees and 10,000 tonnes a year, and dates the PDO to 1993, five years before the register does. Kolymvari has no counterpart union on file; its one organised body is a producers' group assembled in 2014 by Terra Creta. SEDIK, the Σύνδεσμος Ελαιοκομικών Δήμων Κρήτης formed in 2000 from twenty olive municipalities, declares the monumental trees. The island-wide Κρήτη PGI, registered on 4 September 2025 by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1845, names Tsounati by its second name, Mastoeidis — the variety on Vouves inside the Kolymvari zone and on the Azorias trunk, left by the register's own 90 per cent Koroneiki floor at most the residual tenth at Kolymvari, and absent from Sitia.

A lot from either district carries its file number, PDO-GR-0053 or PDO-GR-0052, and a control trail through ELGO-DEMETRA and the regional agricultural directorate. From Sitia expect the container's own code, ΣΗ with serial number and the last two digits of the production year, mill records naming grower, tax number, tree count and variety against an OSDE-registered parcel, and a sworn acidity at or under 0.8. From Kolymvari expect a stated Koroneiki share of 90 per cent or better and, where the miller runs traceability, a lot lookup giving mill, acidity, peroxide and both extinction coefficients, because the district's rulebook has never been published.

Gallura and Sardinia

Italy's oldest attributed tree is a wild olive nobody ever grafted, and the island that holds it keeps it on a national register while its own list of natural monuments leaves it out.

S'Ozzastru stands at Santu Baltolu di Carana, above Lake Liscia at Luras in Gallura: a wild olivastro, Olea europaea subsp. oleaster, that nobody ever grafted. The national register carries it as scheda 03/E752/OT/20, trunk circumference 1,154 centimetres, height 14 metres, the largest olive of any kind on the Sardinian list. Its age is attributed, never dated. The University of Sassari's estimate circulates as 2,500 to 4,000 years and elsewhere as 3,800 to 4,000; the Comune di Luras publishes more than 4,000 and calls the tree the oldest in Italy; the site's own guides say 3,000 to 4,000. The botanist Bruno Peyronel put the patriarch beyond 5,000, on nothing measurable.

Protection is where the record blurs. Luras dates it to 1991, a national natural monument on a ministerial list of twenty secular trees of Italy. Sardinia's register of monumenti naturali, under Regional Law 31 of 1989, holds twenty-one entries; Luras is not among them, though the Olivo millenario di Sini and the Olivastri di Santa Maria Navarrese at Baunei are. Article 7 of Law 10 of 14 January 2013 defines the monumental tree, a decree of 23 October 2014 sets census criteria, felling or damage drawing 5,000 to 100,000 euro in fines. The first list, approved 19 December 2017, held 2,407 trees; the tenth update, decree 0364243 of 24 July 2026, added 82 to reach 5,008 entries over 17,564 specimens. Sardinia's file holds 431; counted through, 73 are Olea, 43 olivastro against 30 cultivated olivo, and three carry a proposal for declaration of notable public interest, S'Ozzastru the only olive among them.

The cultivated record sits south. At Villamassargia, S'Ortu Mannu keeps some 700 monumental olives grafted onto olivastro stock between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, on about 13 hectares of a grove once reaching 500; Sa Reina is put at roughly 900 years and 16 metres round at the collar, against the 1,000 centimetres at breast height the register gives it.

Commission Regulation (EC) No 148/2007 of 15 February 2007 registered Sardegna as a PDO, one zone, the whole island. At least 80 per cent must be Bosana, Tonda di Cagliari, Nera (Tonda) di Villacidro or Semidana, the rest minor local varieties. The specification caps olives at 120 quintals a hectare and extraction at 22 per cent, free acidity under 0.5 per cent, peroxides under 15, total polyphenols and tocopherols above 100 ppm each, panel score at 7 or better. Certified volume stays small: 160,749 kilos across 87 operators in 2023.

Accademia Olearia works 230 hectares and some 25,000 trees at Alghero, Fois family ground since 1890, mostly Bosana with Semidana, Tonda di Cagliari and Nera di Oliena, the trade record calling it the island's largest Sardegna DOP producer. Its Gran Riserva Fruttato took first place in the light-fruity extra virgin class at Ercole Olivario in 2017; Villacidro holds the newer standing, Nicola Solinas's Cuncordu winning the intense-fruity class in 2025.

A lot from Sardinia carries its Sardegna DOP certificate read against a 0.5 per cent acidity ceiling and a panel score of 7, the cultivar named from the four the specification admits, and, where the fruit came off a monumental tree, that tree's scheda number with trunk circumference and height beside it, and no dated age: nothing on the island, S'Ozzastru included, has been ring-counted or radiocarbon-dated.

Mallorca

The terraces are world heritage and the oil is certified to the decimal; the trees the marges were built for are on no register at all.

The designation is a 2002 instrument. The Order of the conseller d'Agricultura i Pesca of 31 October 2002, published in BOIB 135 on 9 November, approved the reglament of the denominació d'origen Oli de Mallorca, whose article 3 splits enforcement between the Consell Regulador, the Conselleria and Madrid. Commission Regulation (EC) No 1437/2004 of 11 August 2004 registered all four forms: Aceite de Mallorca, Aceite mallorquín, Oli de Mallorca, Oli mallorquí. The zone is every municipality on the island. Four varieties are admitted, mallorquina, empeltre, arbequina and picual, as extra virgin in two types, fruity from green fruit and sweet from ripe. Acidity is capped at 0.8, peroxide at 18 meq O2/kg, K270 at 0.20; fruit must reach the mill inside 48 hours and the paste may not pass 28°C.

Article 26 obliges every registered grove, tafona and bottling plant to declare production, elaboration and stocks, and since a presidential resolution of 11 November 2015, in BOIB 173, they must do it in GESTOLI, compulsory and exclusive. The council's July 2026 figures: 3,012.75 hectares of olivar, 509,181 trees, 771 olivicultors, twelve tafones, nineteen envasadores, 466,569.64 litres. Its directory names eighteen firms, twelve of them milling, among them Son Moragues 1921 at Valldemossa, registered as both mill and bottler. At Alcúdia the Solivellas family bottles from Es Guinyent, growing six varieties, three of them on the DO list.

The Cultural Landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana was inscribed on 29 June 2011 by decision 35 COM 8B.34 on criteria (ii), (iv) and (v): 30,745 hectares of property inside a 78,617-hectare buffer, cited for its dry stone terraces, olive groves, posesiones and waterworks. The Consorci Serra de Tramuntana Patrimoni Mundial, agreed by the Govern and the Consell on 9 February 2011, covers twenty municipalities; the Consell signposts 261.1 kilometres of those marges as the GR221 Ruta de Pedra en Sec, 150.1 of them the main line, Port d'Andratx to Port de Pollença.

Ages are claims. The Consorci began cataloguing ancient olives in 2023 and waits on a Serra de Tramuntana law to define them; in September 2025 at the Sóller cooperative it took the Sénia threshold, 3.50 metres of trunk perimeter at 1.30 metres, from the Mancomunitat Taula del Sénia and Territori Sénia. One tree carries a public attribution: the olivera de Can Det at Fornalutx, a single trunk over 6.5 metres round, of the stock AEMO writes as empeltre mallorquina, two varieties in the specification. AEMO named it Spain's best monumental olive in 2020, under a jury led by Angjelina Belaj, and put it at probably more than 1,100 years, planted on its account by Muslims in the ninth century. No ring count exists, and the trade site oli-de-mallorca.com puts 90 per cent of the island's olives at an average 500 years, filing millennial age as popular belief.

A lot from Mallorca carries the Consell Regulador's numbered guarantee seal and its bottler's register number, the type declared fruity or sweet, a variety from the four in the specification, acidity, peroxide and K270 read against 0.8, 18 and 0.20, and a GESTOLI trail behind it. Age travels as attribution alone, a perimeter taken at 1.30 metres or an AEMO citation, because the catalogue that would number these trees is not yet law.

Maestrazgo

The Farga half lost its designation of origin in 2025 without a bottle ever sold under it; across the provincial line, the Empeltre one still stands.

Aceite de la Comunitat Valenciana, nationally protected from a resolution of 19 December 2008, entered the Union register by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 309/2014 of 20 March 2014. Its specification, amended by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/2095, fixed variety bands leaving no room for a monovarietal — Serrana and Villalonga 20 to 40 per cent each, Farga and Blanqueta 10 to 25, Morruda 5 to 10 — and acidity below 0.5. Four of the sixty-five municipalities lie in the Maestrat comarcas: Albocàsser and Tírig in the Alt, Sant Mateu and la Salzadella in the Baix. Its link section leaned harder on the highland, citing the Via Augusta and the millennial-oil routes run by Maestrazgo cooperatives.

Not one bottle was ever sold under the name. The council asked for cancellation on 7 July 2022, the regional annulment came on 15 February 2024, and Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2195 of 29 October 2025 struck it off. The Aragonese half keeps its designation: Aceite del Bajo Aragón, recognised in 2000, filed as PDO-ES-0118, specification approved by Orden AGA/548/2025 of 13 May, Empeltre at 80 per cent minimum, acidity capped at 0.80, extraction inside 48 hours, growing, milling and packing all in the zone, numbered labels issued at Alcañiz against ISO 17065. Of its seventy-seven municipalities the Teruel Maestrazgo supplies Castellote, Bordón and Molinos; Cantavieja, Mirambel, Tronchón and La Iglesuela del Cid stay outside.

The Castellón stock is Farga, about 13,200 hectares on the IVIA's reading, mostly Baix Maestrat and Plana Alta, with over three thousand trunks catalogued as millennial; the Generalitat's own tally is 2,826 in thirty-five Castellón municipalities, against 182 in Alicante, 23 in Valencia. Protection needs no declaration: Ley 4/2006 of 19 May holds a tree generically protected past 350 years or 6 metres of trunk perimeter at 1.30 metres, nearly twice the 3.50 metres that earns a place on the Sénia catalogue.

Culla, at 1,121 metres, holds the Alt Maestrat's one national title: the Olivo Helado, a wild Olea europaea var. sylvestris on a 12.10-metre base, trunks of 4.76 and 3.15 metres, attributed 800 to 1,000 years, killed in the 1956 freeze, left standing dry for over fifty years, then sprouting from the stump a decade before it took AEMO's monumental-olive prize on 24 April 2012. AEMO's Baix Maestrat winners sit inside the Mancomunitat Taula del Sénia; Culla, the eleven other Alt Maestrat municipalities and Sant Mateu do not, so their trunks hold no Sénia catalogue number and no claim on the Farga Milenaria mark. At La Jana, Oleomile works seventeen Farga trunks of 6.5 to more than 9 metres, each past that six-metre line, picked pre-veraison in one day; its Spanish page gives 100 litres and 200 bottles a year, its English page 200 and 400.

A lot from the Maestrazgo carries different papers each side of the provincial line. From the Aragonese half expect the Bajo Aragón PDO, a numbered council label, an Empeltre share of 80 per cent or better and acidity at or under 0.80 certified to ISO 17065. From the Castellón half expect no designation at all since the 2025 cancellation: the municipality and comarca, a trunk perimeter read at 1.30 metres against the six-metre threshold in Ley 4/2006, a variety statement reading Farga, and an age the grower attributes with no dating study behind it.

Kalamata and Messinia

The register holds two Kalamatas, one an oil and one a table olive, while the same word travels out of Messinia as the name of a plant variety.

Καλαμάτα entered the register as a PDO olive oil by Commission Regulation (EC) No 1065/97 of 12 June 1997, its zone the former province of Kalamata, no single document or summary sheet ever published for it. Greece lodged an amendment on 21 December 2009, file EL-PDO-0117-0037, published 26 June 2012 as 2012/C 186/10, asking for the whole regional unit of Messinia, 2,991 square kilometres, its groves put at a million stremmata, 100,000 hectares.

Five oppositions arrived that December: NECTRA FOOD SA of Switzerland, FAR TRADING CO of Egypt, Oluf Lorentzen AS of Norway, CARL B. FELDTHUSEN of Denmark and the United Kingdom. The Danish one was inadmissible; the rest argued the enlarged ground was not homogeneous and that Kalamata province is not Messinia. No agreement came in six months, and the Commission decided under Article 52(3)(b) of Regulation (EU) No 1151/2012. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2015/1393 of 13 August 2015 approved the amendments, holding Messinia already the defined area of the PDO Ελιά Καλαμάτας and correcting the applicant's table, where mean acidity for the rest of Messinia read 0.49 for 0.37.

The approved specification runs mainly on Koroneiki with at most 5 per cent Mastoeidis: free acidity no higher than 0.50 g per 100 g, K232 2.20, K270 0.20, peroxide 14 meq O2/kg, total sterols above 1,100 mg/kg, fruitiness 3–5, bitterness 2–3, pungency 2–4, defects zero. Olives reach the mill within 24 hours, malaxation stays under 27°C, bottling may happen outside the zone where traceability holds.

The table olive is another file: Ελιά Καλαμάτας, PDO-GR-0030, registered by Commission Regulation (EC) No 1107/96 of 12 June 1996 under Article 17 of Regulation (EEC) No 2081/92. Appellation AO-1328, entered on the international register on 8 April 2022 under Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/532, holds little: the Kalamon variety, the administrative boundaries of the Prefecture of Messinia, fruit hand-picked ripe and black, scored, brined, packed in Kalamata oil, control body the Agricultural Department of the Prefecture of Messinia. No acidity figure, no size grade, no defect limit. The named beneficiary is the Agricultural Cooperative Messinia Union, formed in 1987 from the prefecture's seven unions, 244 primary co-operatives and 26,000 members on its own count.

The word itself is the fight. Answering Emmanouil Fragkos on 25 June 2021, the Commission put it that Kalamon carries the synonym Kalamata and is grown extensively beyond the delimited area, in Greece and outside it, and that Article 42 of Regulation (EU) No 1151/2012 lets a varietal term travel where consumers are not misled and competition stays fair. Greece registered the synonym by ministerial decision on 7 February 2018; the Council of State annulled it as inadequately reasoned in decision 1149/2022. Minister Georgios Georgantas re-registered it, Government Gazette B/4641 of 2 September 2022, and the Fourth Section, sitting seven, upheld that in 428/2024, finding the name in use since at least 1954 and compulsory under Presidential Decree 221/1979.

A lot from Messinia carries whichever Kalamata it is entitled to: for oil, file EL-PDO-0117-0037 read against 0.50 g per 100 g acidity, K232 of 2.20 and a defect median of zero, the Koroneiki share stated and Mastoeidis capped at 5 per cent; for the table olive, PDO-GR-0030 and appellation AO-1328; on either, an ELGO-DEMETRA trail and a label code reading KA, serial number and the last two digits of the year.

Alentejo

Three designations of origin here are written around Galega; the hedgerows that came in with Alqueva water went in as Arbequina and Arbosana.

Commission Regulation (EC) No 1107/96 of 12 June 1996 registered Azeites do Norte Alentejano and Azeite de Moura together; No 148/2007 of 15 February 2007 added Azeite do Alentejo Interior. Galega carries all three. Norte Alentejano makes it obligatory at 65 per cent over nineteen concelhos and parts of Évora and Mourão, tolerates Cobrançosa to 10 per cent and Blanqueta, Carrasquenha, Azeiteira and Redondil to 5, forbids Picual, and drops the floor to 50 at Campo Maior and Elvas. Alentejo Interior asks 60 per cent Galega Vulgar and at most 40 of Cordovil de Serpa and Cobrançosa, bars Picual and Maçanilha, and caps extra virgin at 0.8 acidity. Moura, over sixteen freguesias, reverses the weighting — Cordovil 35 to 40 per cent minimum, Verdeal 15 to 20 maximum, Galega the remainder — and both 1996 texts still cap extra virgin at 1.0.

The scale is in Olival em Alqueva, published in November 2020 by EDIA, DGADR, DRAP Alentejo and INIAV. On INE figures it puts Portugal in 2018 at 361,000 hectares of olive and 725,000 tonnes, the Alentejo holding 179,000 hectares and 540,000 tonnes. National area has held constant since 1995, rising here and falling elsewhere, as production nearly quadrupled. Casa do Azeite's packers hold some 85 per cent of branded bottled oil.

Alqueva runs some 130,000 hectares of irrigation. Olive took 61 per cent of its cropped area by 2019: 33,540 hectares registered as vaso, 200 to 600 trees a hectare, against 22,611 as sebe, 1,000 to 2,500 — the study's terms for intensive and super-intensive. Its hedgerow sampling ran on nineteen estates of Arbequina and Arbosana planted between 2008 and 2018. Some 58 per cent of the region's mills stand in the Alqueva zone.

Agricultural projects need no prior licence; assessment bites under Annex II of Decreto-Lei n.º 152-B/2017 of 11 December only where land uncultivated for over five years is reconverted to intensive agriculture across 100 hectares, 50 in sensitive areas, and inside a perimeter already assessed a planting need only keep to its measures. Uprooting or clear-felling an olive stand needs prior DRAP authorisation, isolated trees none, and consent may be given for a more profitable crop or a new olive grove.

Single trees run on Lei n.º 53/2012 of 5 September, classification sitting with ICNF: 555 entries nationally, 39 of them olives, 15 across Évora, Beja and Portalegre. Serpa holds six, attributed 1,000 years, two of them 2,000, by the Abade Correia da Serra statue. CEPAAL, in Moura since 1999, runs the Concurso Nacional de Azeites de Portugal. Esporão bottles a Norte Alentejano DOP at Reguengos de Monsaraz from Galega and Cobrançosa, Agricert-certified at 0.2 per cent acidity; the Fundação Eugénio de Almeida works some 400 hectares at Évora, Galega and Cordovil beside Picual, Arbequina and Koroneiki.

A lot from the Alentejo carries its designation, 1107/96 for Norte Alentejano or Moura and 148/2007 for Alentejo Interior, a varietal breakdown read against the Galega floor, acidity against a ceiling that differs by specification, and a trail through Agricert, Certis or Kiwa Sativa. Where the fruit came off a classified tree, expect the ICNF processo number, circumferences at base and 1.30 metres, and an attributed age, never a ring count. From the irrigated belt expect no designation: an EDIA-registered parcel classed vaso or sebe, and the cultivar.

Malta

Some twenty trees at Mosta carry the highest protection Maltese law affords; the country around them presses under licence, with no designation of origin to put on a label.

Around twenty large olive trees stand in the first part of the Bidnija site at Mosta, protected in 1933 by the Antiquities Preservation Act and at the highest level of protection ever since, on Heritage Malta's record the oldest Bidni specimens known. Carbon dating of the oldest trunks gives, on the same reading, a living age near 500 years, and the studies it cites find a genetic signature specific to that grove. A 2021 radiocarbon study of six trees, by Jonathan Lageard of Manchester Metropolitan University with the Environment and Resources Authority, put their planting in the fifteenth to seventeenth century, against the popular Roman attribution of 1,800 to 2,000 years.

A ministerial statement of January 2021 puts them under the Trees and Woodlands Protection Regulations of 2011, an ERA permit needed even to prune, under a conservation plan agreed between Ambjent Malta and Heritage Malta. Every tree there had tested negative for Xylella fastidiosa, never recorded on the islands.

PRIMO, the Project for the Revival of the Indigenous Maltese Olive, put thousands of trees into farmers' hands under Sammy Cremona; the growers' cooperative dates it to the 1970s and MaltaToday to 2006, and credits it with two Bidni groves, at Tas-Silġ and at Wardija, where the Grima family works some 600 trees for roughly 500 litres a year. Malta picks weeks before Sicily: the 2019 harvest opened on 20 September, and Ta' Matti's Bidni crossed to a Sicilian mill, pressed the next day, no Maltese mill then working to standard.

The statute is Legal Notice 151 of 2023, the Production of Olive Oil Regulations, gazetted on 7 July 2023 under the Supplies and Services Act. Nobody may press oil without a licence from the Director of Agriculture, €25 a year. Licensees enter the Register of Olive Growers and Olive Oil Producers; growers declare their Harvest of Olives by 31 December, millers their production by 15 January with receipts for every delivery, and their stocks by 31 July. Over 800 growers sit on the register and eight to ten mills serve them; the cooperative's 128 members hold more than 8,000 trees between them, and deliveries fell from 868 tonnes in 2023 to 227 in 2024 for 37 tonnes of oil.

No PDO or PGI exists; the national mark is Products of Quality. On 28 December 2024 the Plant Protection Directorate registered the Bidni under Chapter 433, the Plant Quarantine Act, into the National Variety Catalogue. The designation push sat with the Olive Growers Cooperative, whose EAFRD Genetic Resources Project of over €289,000 named Bidni as the intended PDO's main cultivar; the Managing Authority terminated that contract by letter of 23 January 2025, sending it to arbitration, and bidnimalta.org's registration has since expired. The one international record is Platinum in the London competition's 2023 quality awards, entered by Mediterranean Culinary Academy Ltd as a Bidni monovarietal.

A lot from Malta carries no designation of origin, none having ever been registered. What travels is the producer's licence and Register entry under Legal Notice 151 of 2023, the mill's receipt of kilos in by variety, the grower's Harvest of Olives declaration, a cultivar reading Bidni against its National Variety Catalogue entry, a picking date in late September, and an extra virgin certification from a foreign panel. Age travels as attribution: Heritage Malta's 500 years, never the Roman claim.

Bcheale and North Lebanon

The heartland holds the olive with the oldest published radiocarbon date anywhere, and it came in at a fifth of what the ministry protecting it claims.

Sixteen old olives stand above Bcheale, in the Batroun caza of North Lebanon at 1,181 metres; the Ministry of Tourism classes the site Natural Heritage and puts the trees at 6,000 years. Dendrochronologia published the dating in February 2024. Camarero and four co-authors, from IPE-CSIC in Zaragoza, the University of Arizona, the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese University, cut cross-sections here in 2018 and had the heartwood radiocarbon wiggle-match dated at Arizona's Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory against IntCal20. Four pith dates came back with low uncertainty; the oldest read 1,161 ± 131 years.

The paper calls that the oldest dated olive tree anywhere, and holds that most monumental olives are centennial, real millennials confined to hard ground. Bcheale is hard ground: 1,390 millimetres of rain a year at the species' upper limit. Bou Yazbeck and colleagues had reached the same order by growth rate in 2018, putting the largest of fifteen trees, 14.5 metres round at breast height, at 1,413 years ± 150, and their AFLP genotyping put all fifteen in one unnamed variety.

The stock is filed as a group: the Ministry of Agriculture's list names Souri, Baladi, Ayrouni, Telyani and Samakmaki, then treats Soury-Baladi as one thing holding two-thirds of the country's orchards, its characterisation still outstanding. LARI's Abdeh station reads Baladi 1 at 321 milligrams GAE per kilo of total phenols, Baladi 2 at 301. The 2018 ministry figure is 62,048 hectares under olive, 23 per cent of cultivated land, of which North Lebanon holds 17,816: Koura 7,670, Zgharta 5,191, with Akkar counted separately at 8,259. The circulating ministry count is 13 million trees; 103,000 of 170,000 holdings grow olives, at 544 mills, 85 per cent traditional.

No designation of origin exists. What stands in law is LIBNOR, the Lebanese Standards Institution, created by a law of 23 July 1962 under the Ministry of Industry, sole issuer of national standards and the NL mark; its olive-oil text is NL 756, catalogued as NL 756:2015. Ministry of Agriculture decision 658 of 20 July 2011, Official Gazette 35 of 28 July, page 2773, binds any sale to a consumer to its mandatory version, and the ministry's own 2019 evaluation still lists regulations on geographical denomination as work outstanding.

The national contest runs inside HORECA: 27 entrants in 2017 for two silvers, one to Bustan El Zeitoun, 14 in 2018 with gold to the same house, over 40 at the fourteenth edition, April 2019. Both decorated export houses sit south of here: Bustan El Zeitoun at Aabra above Saida, Darmmess at Deir Mimas on Souri alone. Bcheale's own institution is the Eco-Museum of the Olive Tree Culture, funded by the Lebanese National Commission for UNESCO with the Ministry of Culture, the municipality and the Bchaaleh Trails Association.

A lot from North Lebanon carries no catalogue number and no appellation, because neither exists. What travels with it is the caza, Koura, Zgharta, Batroun or Akkar, a variety statement reading Souri or Baladi as a group rather than a certified cultivar, and the declaration decision 658 compels on farm-direct oil: grade, grower, mill and its owner, place and date of pressing, a shelf life inside two years, and acidity and peroxide with the analysis number and date. From the grove itself, 1,161 ± 131 years attaches to one trunk only.

Jaén ancients

The world's biggest olive province proves its oil with a rulebook and a numbered back label, and its oldest trees with an inventory entry and a competition citation, never with a date.

Olive covers 582,427 hectares of Jaén, 89.75 per cent of its cultivated land, on the IGP Aceite de Jaén specification's figure. The agriculture ministry puts the province at about 37 per cent of Spanish production, and its ESYRCE survey has olive on 44.05 per cent of the provincial surface. The Junta's aforo of 2 October 2025 put the 2025/26 crop at 475,000 tonnes, 44 per cent of Andalusia's. The council's own figures run rounder: 66 million trees, 550,000 hectares, a fifth of world production.

Three designations of origin hold the mountains. Sierra Mágina, registered by Commission Regulation (EC) No 2107/1999, runs on Picual and Manzanillo de Jaén over fifteen municipalities and 61,000 hectares of olive, at 0.5 acidity and 18 peroxide. Sierra de Segura, on the register since Regulation (EC) No 1107/96, admits Picual, Verdala, Royal and Manzanillo de Jaén across fourteen municipalities, Arroyo del Ojanco among them, at peroxide under 19 and K270 under 0.20, with no acidity figure of its own. Sierra de Cazorla, registered by Regulation (EC) No 1971/2001, takes nine municipalities at 0.7 acidity.

Aceite de Jaén entered the Union register as a PGI in 2020, file PGI-ES-2322, by the regulation in OJ L 156 of 19 May, its zone all 97 municipalities. Picual holds over 90 per cent of the zone's olive area, beside Manzanilla de Jaén, Royal de Cazorla and Carrasqueño de Alcaudete; 85 per cent of any oil must come off those natives, picked before 31 December and milled within 36 hours. Acidity is capped at 0.5, peroxide 15, K270 0.18, K232 2.00, verified by Fundación Certioleo.

The ancient record is short: the Junta's 2004 inventory volume for Jaén indexes 62 singular trees; three are olives — the Olivo de Fuentebuena, filed under Beas de Segura, the Olivo de la Era de la Zarza at Castillo de Locubín, and the Acebuche de Las Hoyas, a wild olive at La Iruela. Both national titles sit on that list: Fuentebuena took AEMO's monumental-olive prize on 7 May 2019, its trunk past 4 metres round on the jury's measure, near five in the press, and Las Hoyas the 2023 award on a 7.5-metre perimeter, IFAPA's jurors reading its canopy as a grafted cultivated variety. Municipality and jury record Fuentebuena as a Natural Monument declared by the Junta; the press calls it the world's largest on a Guinness attribution; its age is attributed, several centuries.

Jaén Selección, created in 2003 by the Diputación de Jaén, picks eight extra virgins a harvest; the 2026 edition drew 62 entries, seven of eight winners cooperative mills. The Royal is the other niche: the Cazorla specification counts 1,843 hectares of it in the Cazorla-Quesada comarca, 4.4 per cent of that comarca's olive, grown nowhere else. Verde Esmeralda at Úbeda bottles it as Red Diamond.

A lot from Jaén carries a designation before it carries a tree: the IGP's numbered back label with a picking date before 31 December and acidity, peroxide, K270 and K232 read against 0.5, 15, 0.18 and 2.00 under Fundación Certioleo; or a PDO council's counter-label, Mágina at 0.5 acidity, Cazorla at 0.7, Segura at peroxide 19 and K270 0.20. Age travels as attribution: a name in the 2004 inventory volume, an AEMO citation, a perimeter read at 1.20 metres, no dating study in the province.

Les Garrigues

The Consell calls it the first food designation of origin in Spain; who carried its one variety to Arbeca, and in which century, the record still cannot settle.

Recognition came by an Order of 28 October 1975, in the BOE of 20 November, on a petition from Lleida's Cámara Oficial Sindical Agraria and its UTECO, under Ley 25/1970. It named the designation Borjas Blancas, for virgin oils from the Garrigues and Borges Blanques comarcas, and gave a provisional Consejo Regulador a year to draft a rulebook fixing zone, varieties and the registers of growers, millers and bottlers. That rulebook came as the Order of 10 May 1977. The Generalitat renamed it Les Garrigues on 9 August 1993; Madrid ratified that on 19 January 1994.

Commission Regulation (EC) No 1107/96 of 12 June 1996 registered it under the Article 17 procedure, a bare place-name with no word for oil in it. The register holds file PDO-ES-0070, no single document, no summary sheet, an amendment in progress. The one published summary, Annex II to Regulation (EC) No 1902/2004 of 29 October 2004, added eight municipalities and gives Arbequina and Verdiell, acidity below 0.5 degrees, peroxide at most 15, moisture under 0.1 per cent, in two types: fruity and greenish with a bitter-almond taste, or sweet and yellow. The Generalitat's dossier puts Arbequina at 90 per cent minimum.

Forty-eight municipalities carry it, 23 of the 24 in Les Garrigues itself, 16 in el Segrià and nine in l'Urgell, Juneda only to the Lleida–Tarragona road, Sunyer only to the Seròs canal. The Ministry's 2023 return gives 14,186 hectares registered, 2,353 growers, 17 mills, 21 packers, 2,696 tonnes certified and 2,081 sold. The Consell lists twenty cooperatives and mills, keeps three registers and holds ENAC accreditation 102/C-PR242 to ISO/IEC 17065.

The mills are co-operative, mostly a century old; Maldà's, of 1911, is on the Consell's account the first in Lleida province. Cèsar Martinell built three inside the zone in 1920, at l'Albi, Arbeca and el Soleràs, with Ciutadilla in l'Urgell earlier; the Generalitat's architectural inventory carries them as cards 13832, 13834, 14056 and 42441. The cathedral name is l'Espluga de Francolí's, in the Conca de Barberà. On Catalonia's register of arbres monumentals, under Decret 214/1987, this comarca holds one entry: a pair of plane trees at Puiggròs, the one municipality the designation leaves out.

The variety is named for Arbeca. The Institut d'Estudis Catalans' survey of Catalan varieties sets the popular attribution, a Castilian duke of Medinaceli carrying it from the Near East to Arbeca in the fifteenth century, against recent work pointing to a Cardona; other Catalan accounts make it the eighteenth century and Palestine. Documented is the eleventh duke's order of 15 April 1763, promising a ral de billó for every arbequina planted, with no record it was paid. Verdiell holds barely 500 hectares, mostly outside the zone. Catalonia counts monumental olives under Llei 6/2020 at 350 centimetres of trunk measured at 130 centimetres, or 350 years; its June 2025 census found 4,160, all but 171 in the Terres de l'Ebre.

A lot from Les Garrigues carries the designation registered in 1996 as PDO-ES-0070, a numbered back-label from the Consell Regulador under ENAC accreditation 102/C-PR242, a type declared fruity or sweet, a variety statement reading Arbequina with Verdiell the only other admitted stock, and acidity read against 0.5 degrees rather than the general standard's 0.8. No age travels with it: no olive in these comarcas sits on a Catalan register.