Oleum 09- Seville

Hello:
My name is Miguel, I’m 15 years old, I’m from Spain and I take part in Comenius Project “In the shadow of trees”; I hosted a Hungarian boy. I’m going to talk about Arahal, olives and olive oil.
Arahal is in the South of Spain, in Andalusia, and it’s 40 km far from Seville, the capital of Andalusia. Arahal has been traditionally an agrarian town and we can see it because we have a lot crops, mainly olive and wheat. Olive trees for us mean our work, but our fair in September is also dedicated to olives, it coincides with olive harvest.
A lot of people work in the country harvesting olives, at the beginning of September, so many children, young people and adults go to help out.
A long time ago there were big country estates of olive groves or other crops, they also usually had country houses where a whole family who worked in country houses could be living there. It was also very usual to have animals in country houses like mules, horses, pigs, chickens, etc… and their own mill to obtain olive oil.
Currently those large country estates are divided in smaller plots of land and they are only persevered some country houses, but we still go on picking olives like in ancient times, with “macacos” and “bancos”
In our school we have a project called “Olivar y Escuela” (Olive grove & School) where our teachers (mainly Carlos Zamorano and Eloísa Valverde) teach us about olives and olive trees because we are surrounded by olives, so this is the reason why our teacher want us to learn about olive and olive trees .
Our last project was in Seville, in Oleum 09, where we explained chiefly the olive oil obtaining, but we also explained some characteristics of olives. Currently we are working for “Science Fair” and there we will explain “Five Kingdoms in Olive grove”. We will talk about the five kingdoms (animals (animalia), vegetables (vegetalia), fungus, bacteria and protozoa) which we are going to explain this with scale models.

Banco: a tool used to pick up the olives we use a ladder that folds out to make two ladders; we use this so that two people can use the ladder at the same time.

Macaco: is a kind of basket that we hang in our neck, made of esparto grass. We use it when we pick up olives from trees to carry them to another bigger recipient.