Looking ahead: The olive grove cultural landscape

The landscape of the olive grove is a paradigmatic cultural landscape, which perfectly integrates the tangible and intangible. It is an outstanding witness of a form of exploitation that goes back millennia on the calendar of humanity. Is inextricably linked to the Greco-Roman culture that was born around the Mediterranean and keeps some traditional forms of habitat and monumental ensembles . Olive cultivation also remains active today in many regions with the same techniques and traditions and simultaneously is a thriving industry where new technologies and knowledge are applied. It is one of the major crops that still needs to be registered on the World Heritage List, where agricultural landscapes are unequally represented. This landscape covers huge surfaces all around the Mediterranean basin. In Andalusia, the largest area of “humanized forest” in Europe, the olive trees combing the hills have become a landscape at the confluence of the four main lines of Unesco: Cultural and Natural Heritage (inscriptions on the List: monumental renaissance ensembles of Ubeda and Baeza), Intangible Heritage (inscribed: the Mediterranean diet and flamenco), Cultural Diversity (inherited from Roman, Arab and Christian kingdoms) and Biodiversity (live olive groves and holm oak ecosystem, forming typical Mediterranean forest). In this area new exemplary lines for ecotourism, cultural tourism and economic development have been developed based on the olive heritage.