The name Granada is ancient and mysterious. It may be a word of Oriental origin meaning great castle, for the Iberian, later Roman fortress which once stood on the Albaicin Hill. When the Moors came here, the town was largely inhabited by Jews, for which they called it Garnat-al-Yahud - Granada of the Jews. The Jews were one of the first peoples to come here from the east, even before the Romans conquered the peninsula in the second century before Christ.

Some say that the name Albaicin means "quarter of the falconers", but most historians now prefer "quarter of the people of Baeza". During the Christian Reconquest, when the Moors were driven out of the city of Baeza, near Jaen, in the 13th century, they fled to Granada and re-settled on the northern part of the hill, creating a suburb outside of the fortress walls which was called, literally the place of the people of Baeza. Most of what we now call Albaicin was in fact the Alcazaba, the Moorish citadel, stretching from the Colegiata del Salvador to the Plaza San Miguel Bajo. Only the western wall of this fortress still exists (it's best seen from the Mirador San Cristobal); the castle keep stood on what is now the Plaza San Nicolás. It was only after the fall of Cordoba, in 1236, when the centre of Moorish power was transferred to Granada - bringing a massive influx of nobles, architects and money - that the old castle (alcazaba kadima) was abandoned in favour of the newly built, fabulous castle on the hill across the river valley: the Alhambra, Calat-Al-Hamra or "The Red Castle", so called for its reddish stone.

Remains of the Moorish period can be found at every turn of this fascinating quarter's twisting alleyways. Most of the Albaicin's churches are built on the foundations of Moorish mosques, and many have conserved their external cisterns for the ritual washing of the faithful. Much of the ancient fortifications still stand: the walls and towers above the Cuesta de Alhacaba, and the great city gates (Elvira, Monaita, de las Pesas and half of Bab-Al-Bonud), several interesting minarets-converted-into-bell-towers, the most precious of which is the Alminar de San José, dating from the 10th century and unchanged apart from the Christian bellfry on its top, and the courtyard of what was once the Albaicin's Great Mosque, now attached to the church of the Colegiata del Salvador.

The story of this church tells us much about Andalucia's difficult transition from Islam to Christianity. After Granada was taken by the Christians at the end of the 15th century, he great mosque of the Albaicin was demolished, except for the inner courtyard, to make way for the new religious authority. The building was destined to be not only a church but a mission school - colegiata - for the evangelisation of the Moors. This is why it was located in the heart of their medina, although there was such resistance from the inhabitants that the priests abandoned it and it was closed for many years. The inner courtyard, El Patio de los Naranjos, is one of Granada's finest examples of pre-Alhambra Moorish architecture.

The Albaicin is rich in folklore: the Crucifix which stands in the Plaza San Miguel is called El Cristo de las Lañas - the Christ of the Clamps - because of the heavy iron clamps which hold the sections of his broken body together. When the Civil War broke out in 1936, the Republican (leftist) soldiers smashed the statue, leaving the local people to hide the fragments each in a different cellar, until they could be reconstituted after the war. The name of the Puerta de las Pesas - the Gate of the Weights, which you must pass through to reach Plaza Larga, is linked to the market which has for centuries been held in the square (now on Saturday mornings only). When the king's inspectors detected merchants using scales with rigged weights, these pesas were hung on spikes on the wall of the gate. Whatever became of the offending merchants (one prefers not to think), a few of the blackened, rusty weights can still be seen on the plaza-side of the gate.

In Moorish times, the bed of the River Darro was uncovered all the way from the short stretch which we can now see at the foot of the Alhambra through Plaza Nueva, Calle Reyes Católicos, and broad shopping street which is still called Acera del Darro (Walk of the Darro) for the stream which still flows beneath it. Of course, it was crossed by the same charming bridges which still grace the Paseo de los Tristes. This name, The Road of the Grieving, is given to all streets which lead to cemeteries in Spain; the old path to Granada's cemetery, atop the Alhambra, ran up the right bank of the river, crossing the bridge called Puente del Rey Chico and winding up along the Cuesta de los Chinos, under the Alhambra walls. One of the bridges - destroyed when the river was covered at the beginning of the century - connected the Corral del Carbón on the left bank (a magnificently restored merchant's inn with courtyard, which among other things coal was sold, hence the name "Courtyard of Coal") to the bustling Plaza Bibarrambla. The name of this square (Bib=Gate, Rambla=Strand) refers to the magnificent city gate which stood near the water's edge; the long rectangle of the square, like the Campo del Principe on the left bank of the river, was once the place of the Moorish lists where noblemen jousted on their Arabian steeds. Later the Inquisition used to hold auto-da-fés and burn heretics and Jews, with a preference for those with lots of property which could be confiscated.

Just north of this square is a tightly-meshed grid of alleyways decorated with Moorish-style arches, now containing Granada's tourist souvenir shops: the Alcaicería. In the Middle Ages this was the site of the Great Bazaar of Granada, to which merchants came from all over Islam and Christendom: it stretched right up to the foot of the Alhambra hill. Many of these bazaars were famous for their silk, of which Granada was a major producer, since the days of the Roman Empire; and because Caesar had given the people of the Middle East the exclusive right to sell the precious stuff (in exchange for the appropriate taxes), to show their gratitude they generically called all such bazaars Al-Caicería, "Caesar's Place". But the geometrically neat and tidy Alcaicería we see today is a fake - the real honeycomb fleshpot-style Arab souk burned down in the early 19th century. Matches had just been invented and a shop selling them caught fire in the night, leaving the entire bazaar in cinders. On a small part of the site, a pseudo-Moorish pastiche was built to take its place in 1843, launching the 19th century fashion for neo-arabic architecture which remained alive for so long.

Close by stands La Capilla Real - The Royal Chapel, the mausoleum of the Catholic Kings Isabel and Ferdinand, who chose to be buried in Granada because they saw its conquest as the crowning achievement of their reign - for lack of hindsight, they did not imagine that this would soon prove to be their sponsorship of Columbus' journey. Isabel of Castille was at heart a woman of the Middle Ages, as demonstrated by her precious collection of Flemish masters on view in the Sacristy. She wanted a small, humble mausoleum for her and all her descendants, befitting the follower of Saint Francis which she was. But she died before the chapel could be built, and, in the company of Ferdinand, spent some twenty years in a provisional tomb inside the Alhambra walls, where a Franciscan monastery had been installed in the shell of the palace mosque (it is now an elegant hotel, the Parador San Francisco, well worth visiting even if you can't afford to stay there).

The architects made the chapel-mausoleum larger and more luxurious than planned, with the result that it is neither humble nor truly grand; in any case, her successor and grandson Carlos V - the master of the new Empire which she had founded - judged it too modest for the masters of a reign on which the sun never set, and the Royal Pantheon for all subsequent monarchs was eventually moved to the blockbuster Escorial Monastery outside Madrid, built by his son Felipe II, who knew how to do things on the right scale!

It may seem strange that Granada's Cathedral should have been built in the new Italian Renaissance style while the Royal Chapel of which it is an appendage is in the earlier Gothic style favoured by Queen Isabel. The explanation is a significant one: after the Reconquest a makeshift "Cathedral" was first set up inside the Great Mosque, creating the same bizarre combination we see today in the Mezquita of Cordoba, with its Christian church in the midst of the Moorish colonnades; but long after the Royal Chapel was finished, the mosque-cathedral contraption was torn down and rebuilt in the "new" Renaissance style.

Other little-known but curious facts...

In Plaza Nueva, Queen Isabel's stern confessor, the Muslim-hating Cardinal Cisneros, had burnt some 80,000 books from the Muslim University, many of which were Arabic translations of Greek philosophers, claiming that they were all Korans.

In the Alhambra's Sala de Embajadores (Hall of the Ambassadors), the magnificent tower overlooking the city with the galaxy of stars imbedded in its arched ceiling, the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand signed the decree ordering the expulsion of Jews, on March 31 1492.

The second chunk-of-a-bridge bridge over the River Darro, as one leaves Plaza Nueva, is what remains of a great viaduct - itself part of the city fortifications - called the Puente del Cadí, which joined the Alhambra Hill to the Albaicin. (See the illustration above).

On the Paseo de los Tristes is El Bañuelo, the only Arab bath house which was not destroyed by the Christians, who thought that the Arabs' love of bathing was a sign of effeminacy and decadence. The star-shaped openings in the roof were tiny stained-glass vents designed to lift automatically when the steam in the bath became too hot.

The circular Christian palace known as the Palacio de Carlos Quinto which stands in the midst of the Alhambra was ordered built by Charles I of Spain, who was also Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire (although the grandson of Isabel and Ferdinand, he was born in Ghent), for the simple reason that he thought the Alhambra was a fine place to live but wanted a building commensurate with his importance. In spite of the clash with the delicate Moorish style of the Alhambra, some of which had to be destroyed to make way for it, it has an artistic value of its own, being the first Renaissance building made outside of Italy. But because of financial problems the construction was a stop-and-go affair which continued over several hundred years... and was not completed until the 20th century, when it was made use of for the first time - as a concert hall.

The narrowest street in Granada, San Juan de los Reyes, which runs parallel to he River Darro along the lower part of the Albaicin Hill, and which at one point becomes the narrowest street in Granada, was once a Roman road. Do not attempt to drive down it if your car measures more than 1.5 metres in width. Most of the deep grooves on the walls on either side of the narrowest point were made by vans belonging to Brits and Germans who didn't understand the warning sign on the arched gate at the beginning of the street...

One of the main avenues of Granada, Calle de Recogidas, or "Street of the Cloistered Women", was named for the convent-cum-women's prison used to rehabilitate prostitutes, which once stood on the site of the Hotel Brasilia.

The gypsy quarter, El Sacromonte, gets its name from the Abbey which stands above it on the hill, and which in turn got its name - the Holy Mount - from some fake tablets "found" there - in fact planted there for the purpose of persuading the local Muslims to give up their religion - in the 16th century, and which described, in Arabic, the purported martyrdom of San Cecilio, presented as a pre-Islamic Arab who converted to Christianity. The authenticity of the tablets was later rejected by the Vatican, but the name Sacromonte remains.

Last but not least - in terms of humorous interest - is the rather disappointing fact that the world-famous song "Granada", which has become the self-appointed anthem of the city and sung by lung-bursting baritones for every new busload of old age pensioners, is actually the creation of the great Mexican composer, Agustín Lara, who was so afraid of planes and boats that he never set foot in Europe, let alone Granada itself. The opening line indirectly states this: "Granada, soñada por mí" means, approximately, "Granada, land of my dreams". The song goes on to enumerate all the fabulous sights which Lara had read about but never seen.

Every time I come down from my retreat among the olive groves of Upper Granada Province and set foot in "civilization" - that is, the north European variety thereof - in places such as Estepona, Mojácar or even Chelsea, London where I have some friends - I am struck by the amazing number of times which people say "thank you" without really meaning it, for a service as trifling as passing the salt during dinner. Living most of the time among Spaniards, "gracias" seems like a big word to me, reserved for gifts and favours of a more substantial kind. In my village, when we go into a bar and yell "íPepe, ponme una caña!", Pepe doesn’t expect us to say por favor, or gracias either, once the beer has been served; in fact, he would find it excessive and even ridiculous if we did.

This is because, in Spanish culture, the normal little things we automatically do for each other all day long, such as opening the door when we are the first one to get to it, are taken for granted; not doing them would certainly be commented on, but otherwise they are given no verbal tribute at all. There was on the coast a restaurant I know of which employed an English waitress because they needed someone who could speak to the tourists. After a few weeks the Spanish owner, no longer able to contain himself, called her on one side and burst out, "If you say "gracias" once more when the cook hands you a dish, you’re fired!".

These are the irrational little things which distinguish an Englishman from a Spaniard no matter how well he learns his host’s vocabulary. I have been an on-and-off resident of Montefrio for almost 40 years and I have still not ironed all of them out of my everyday behaviour. Somerset Maugham wrote that we are more willing to forgive people for being immoral or even criminal than for insignificant idiosyncracies such as, to quote his example, lining up peas on one’s knife and then lifting the knife to one’s mouth to eat them. Such cultural details give even the most diligent student of local language and customs away as belonging to another tribe.

It’s also funny to see the guests at my rental cottages, when having a drink with me and my local friends, pick up a plate of tapas from the middle of the table, where it is no closer to them than anyone else, and kindly proffer it to each of the surprised Spaniards, as if they had some physical impediment which made it difficult for them to reach out for themselves. Being deferential by nature to outsiders, the villagers dutifully take an olive or crisp, whether they feel like eating one or not. Here, we traditionally eat like Arabs, all gathered around a few big dishes and jabbing at them with forks, or even dipping into them with our fingers, without anyone to encourage or help us of course. I should add that this usually takes place amid such shouting and laughing that such niceties as ¨gracias¨ would probably not even be heard anyway.

Depressingly for those who are in the process of learning Spanish, knowing a little of it can often make the foreigner seem more idiotic knowing none at all. My father wandered through Spain in the 1930’s - just like Laurie Lee and Gerald Brenan - and comes back to see me here often. But, now in his 80’s, he has forgotten most of his Spanish and has a hard time making himself understood. Once, we passed by a house where there was an impressively thick and gnarled grapevine, or parra, growing on the porch, in the shade of which sat an elderly lady in black. My Dad wondered how old it could be and mustering all of his considerable pluck, went up to the lady and began enunciating, very slowly, the sentence, ¿Cuántos años tiene...? but faltered when he reached the word for grapevine, which he didn’t know in Spanish. The woman look up startled and fled into the house. A moment later her husband came out to indignantly ask Dad what he wanted - because, it seems, she had taken the sentence to be complete as said, and, as such, correctly understood it as meaning that my father wanted to know not the parra’s age but her own.

An American woman who stayed recently in the loft of my house - the apartment I call The Granary - told me about a friend of hers who lives in Salobreña and knows more Spanish than most. She had written an advertisement for renting her villa and went to the photocopy shop to have it printed up as a brochure - in Spanish, un folleto. There were two women in the shop and she said to them, unwittingly changing the gender of the subject, "Quiero hacer una folleta". The association of this new word she had just, as it were, invented with the very rude Spanish verb follar sent the ladies - to the americana’s great consternation - into hysterical laughter, since it gave the impression she was in search not of a Xerox machine but a lusty male.

Similar bloopers are made by American women who refuse a second helping at dinner by saying "Estoy llena" - "I’m full" - which in barnyard Spanish would be understood as meaning "I’m pregnant". But there´s no need to feel too bady about it – similar embarrassments are created by Spanish-speakers in our countries when letting people know they have a cold, which in Spanish is constipado.

Just last week the son of a neighbouring farmer asked me to help him write a letter (I’m well known in the region for my political pamphlets) to a young lady whom he would like to marry but is too shy to approach. I asked him what exactly he wanted to say in it, and he said that I could put it any way I thought best, but that his aim was to "entrar en relaciones" with her. Of course, he just wants to start a relationship with her which could end in something more specific, but if he had been in the situation of most English-speakers in Spain, I might have concluded that he was lusting after the same thing which, to the understanding of the ladies in the photocopy shop, drove the americana to make her shocking declaration.

But the most common source of friction is, without a doubt, our compulsive need to thank people for just about everything they do. Germans do it just as incorrigibly as the British, as illustrated by a joke I heard in France about the man who stayed in a hotel and asked the clerk in the morning if there was not a railway line passing nearby. No, she answered, and asked him what made him think that there was. Well, he said, it seemed to him that at intervals in the night he heard a train rattling past. Oh no, she said, that’s just the two Germans who are staying in the next room, and who are always saying to one another, "Danke Schoen-Bitte Schoen, Danke Schoen-Bitte Shoen...".

But the French shouldn’t talk - the better brought up variety are just as effusively thankful for being given salt and having doors opened as us. A Parisian friend of mine, who studied flamenco guitar in Seville, took his mother to Spain, and while she was here she tried to learn a few words of Spanish, because she hated having to depend on him in order to speak to the natives. When she didn’t know the right Spanish word she would blithely give the appropriate French one a Spanish twist, hoping that this would be understood. As they drove across the Spanish border - this was back in the 60’s when there were still immigration controls - she showed the guard her passport, and when he gave it back thanked him by saying, very clearly and as her parting shot at the long-suffering Spanish tongue, "Muchas mercias".

As you travel along the mountain road from Granada, the white village which appears below in the valley, with its high-towered castle-church, resembles a ship sailing across a rolling sea of bushy, low-lying, gnarled trees... those trees that produce the cholesterol-free green gold which all the world desires. Montefrio's olive oil is known for its purity and pungent flavour; in fact, much of the highly reputed and very expensive Italian-brand olive oil which is sold in New York in those pretty golden tins is the product of our groves, cleverly shipped across the Med and packed for re-export by the descendants of Machiavelli.

The main difference between the quality of olive oil and the quality of wine is that fermentation improves grape juice but damages olives. The best oil comes from olives which reach the mill in unfermented condition; the oil which is produced by the first simple pressing is known as virgin, or extra virgin, depending on the quality of its smell and taste. From Roman times up to the first half of our century, olives were crushed between mill stones, turned by hand or dragged by an ox or mule. The large conical stones which one sees decorating the entrance gates to Andalucian farms were in use until very recently; the tip of the cone was attached to an axle and the mule dragged the base in a circle over the olives which were shovelled onto it. With the Industrial Revolution, a press composed of huge pistons was invented. Round straw mats, with a circular hole in the middle, called carpachos, were placed over the pistons one by one, after shovelling layers of olives between them. When pressure was applied on the piston, this multiple sandwich compressed and the oil which oozed out of the mats was caught in a vat below. One of these curious machines is still in use in Montefrio, at the Molino de San Cristobal. Our other mills, however - the Cooperativa de San Francisco and the Torre del Sol, use modern stainless steel equipment (all imported from Italy), which crushes the olives between rollers and then separates the resulting mash, diluted with warm water, by centrifugal spinning.

The three elements which result from the milling process are oil, fibre (called orujo) and a very bitter substance called alpechin. When foreigners come to Spain for the first time they all invariably make the mistake of picking a fat, shiny olive and biting into it, to the delight of the locals, who point the way to the nearest fountain so that the gagging victim can rinse out his mouth. When olives are cured for eating rather than oil, and left in a solution of briny water, this substance is slowly released and rises to the surface, like a black scum.

(It is interesting to note that the elimination of the alpechin is a major ecological problem in Spain, not only because it stinks - especially in summer - but also because it can pollute groundwater sources. After all the oil has been removed from the fibrous orujo, the remaining sawdust-like substance is used for heating fuel and for baking bricks and ceramics, but no one has yet devised a way of recycling the unwanted alpechin. The ponds you see in the countryside, full of black liquid (or the dried remains thereof) are where the alpechin is dumped. These ponds, or alpechineras, are now supposed to be a minimum distance from inhabited areas, but there is one near Montefrio's Plaza del Convento which can often be smelled, from the other side of the high white wall, as you walk up into El Coro.)

All oil produced in Montefrio is virgin for the simple reason that we do not have a "refinery". The refineries, in the outskirts of the larger cities, take the fibrous orujo and, using a chemical process, extract more oil from it. This "refined" oil, called aceite de orujo or orujillo, is much blander in taste and paler in colour, and of course commands much lower prices. If you buy "aceite virgen" in the supermarkets you will usually see in the small print that it is in fact virgen blended with aceite de orujo, in the same way that old wines are blended with new. But since there is no factory able to chemically process the pulp in Montefrio, ours is guaranteed 100% virgin.

The value of the oil is also determined by the percentage of acidez, or acidity. Olives which have fallen or been picked from the tree some days or weeks before milling will be more fermented, and therefore have higher levels of acidity, , than those which are milled immediately; the proper handling and washing of the olives also helps to prevent fermentation. In order to qualify as virgin oil, acidity should be below 1% (although experts differ on the exact threshold). Most of the oil milled in Montefrio, for example, has a 0.4% acidity content, which is very low. When the level of acidity in the olives reaching the mill is too high, they must be sent to the refinery, along with the residual orujo.

The denomination "extra virgin" - in Spanish, virgen extra - is only given (by an official taster from the Instituto de la Grasa in Seville) to oil with, as well as low acidity, exceptionally good flavour, colour and smell.

At a typical modern mill, such as the Cooperativa de San Francisco and the Torre del Sol, the process is as follows: the olives are dumped from the truck into a bin, from which they are fed by conveyor belts to machines outside the mill building which remove the leaves and branches and wash them clean. Then they are fed into the building where they are crushed and processed, as described above. The resulting oil must stand for several months in huge vats so that any remaining solid particles can sediment to the bottom, before being sold.

It takes roughly 4 or 5 kilos of olives to produce a litre of olive oil, depending on the quality of the fruit, and the farmers either take away the agreed amount of oil for their own use, or sell the olives to the mill; but since most farmers only require a small amount of oil for their own use, about 95% of the total crop is sold for cash. The increasingly high price - currently about 100 pesetas per kilo - has touched off a real "olive fever", with new trees being planted everywhere, usually in the place of almond trees and cereals for animal fodder. European subsidies have had an encouraging effect on this trend, as can be imagined. A tree can bear between 50 and 150 kilos of olives, and it takes about 8 years for a new tree to begin bearing fruit.

Many visitors to Spain believe that green olives and black olives are grown on different varieties of tree, but in fact the green ones are just unripe olives which are picked early, in October (the picking of green olives for eating purposes is called verdear, or "greening"). The fruit must be left to ripen and turn black, until January or February, before it can be picked for milling. In Andalucia the custom is to use green olives for eating and black ones for oil; black olives are virtually never used for eating purposes.

The harvesters work in teams - cuadrillas - of four or five; the men use long sticks to beat the branches, and the women spread huge nets - mantas (once made of canvas, nowadays of nylon mesh) under the tree and gather the olives which fall into it. Since the terrain is very mountainous, the edges of the lower part of the net are propped up with stakes, to prevent the olives from bouncing down the hill. But the windfalls must be picked off the ground by hand first, which means that more women are needed when the winter has been stormy than when all the fruit has stayed on the branches.

The soil of the olive groves is tilled constantly and herbicide is used to prevent grass from taking hold, because the farmers believe that this aerates the roots and encourages permeation of rainfall (while the ecologists complain that, due to wind erosion, it is adding to the desertification process which is overcoming much of Spain). Since the heavily ploughed surface is rough, a few months before the olives are ripe (when they are most likely to fall), a circular space under the tree is smoothed with rakes, or by a battery of truck tires dragged by a tractor, to make it easier to collect them manually. This is called hacer el suelo - preparing the ground.

The harvests of early 1996 and early 1997 have provided all of us with dramatic examples of the effects of drought, in the case of the former, and excessive rainfall, in the case of the latter. At the end of an accumulative sequía which had lasted over 15 years - with as little as 1/3 of the minimum necessary annual rainfall total of 600 cubic metres - only 1/5 of the olive trees, by mid-December, were bearing any olives at all, and even these were so tiny that they didn't seem to be worth picking. Then the rain began, and although the barren trees remained barren, the existing olives swelled up - one could almost see it happening from one day to the other - to a quite respectable size by harvesting time, so that the net result was not the total disaster which had been expected. Nevertheless, the vastly reduced amount of oil which went on the market sent prices soaring everywhere.

In the meantime, the rain continued through the year, bringing Spain's chronic drought situation to a spectacular end - and allowing nature to make one its amazing comebacks. By the end of 1996, the trees were burgeoning with more olives than had ever been seen before, almost as large as small plums, auguring the "harvest of the century". But one should never count one's olives before they are in the mill. The rains of December were even heavier than the year before, and stretched on through January, making it impossible for the pickers to enter the fields. Since the earth is kept raw and without grass covering, the men and women would have sunk to their knees in mud, and even on the few fine days, when the picking continued, the tractors were unable to pick up the sacks of fruit, making it necessary to carry them out by hand.

The economic losses were enormous, with the rain throwing half the olives onto the ground, where the fruit fermented and - even worse - sunk into the mud. Most of the harvest was unsuitable for the manufacture of "virgin" oil - the level of acidity was intolerably high and the olives had to be sold, at a much lower price, to a refinery, to produce aceite refinado. But the rain, although destructive in the short term, is money in the bank: even if, after such a deluge, it were to definitively stop, the ground would be saturated with enough moisture to guarantee bumper crops - and to keep our wells overflowing - for the next 3 or 4 years.

When the weather turns nasty in wintertime, at 2,500 feet above sea level, working from dawn to lunch (three o'clock) in the mud and wind can be arduous, and to make their lot more bearable the fun-loving Andalucians have developed a curious tradition of chatting and joking - diciendo tonterías - which, like so much else in their way of doing things, is much less spontaneous than one might think. Some of the more loquacious and entertaining individuals are especially sought after when the teams are composed, because they keep spirits up and make the work go faster...

The olive harvest provides between two and three months of work each winter for people who normally do not earn wages (such as students and housewives) and for the seasonal workers who are home from the beach resorts. There has been little incentive to develop mechanical pickers (there are devices which shake the trees and suck up the olives like vacuum cleaners, but they cause damage to the branches) because this would take away much-needed cash from the field workers, and create an additional burden for the government. This is why the olive harvesters are so heavily subsidised, by the Socialist government's most criticised invention: the Plan de Empleo Rural, popularly known as the PER (pronounced like pear), designed to benefit Andalucia's poor farmers. The PER has in some ways taken the place of the Catholic Church in the eyes of the poor, ignorant campesinos - life without it can simply not be imagined, since, after the harvest is over, the field workers are entitled to unemployment benefits for a period of time proportional to the days they have worked. The result has been an epidemic of fraudulent "fake work days" - falsas jornadas - certified by the all-too willing land owners. It has even created a reverse flow of immigrants coming into Andalucia - persons living in other parts of Spain who come to stay with some distant relative in the south during or after the olive harvest, so as to be able to claim - whether they actually work or not - the monthly benefits provided by the notorious PER...

yes it sounds interesting

thanks irres