Olive oil maker
Miguel Ángel García González
Business
Rontonar Aceites · Benifallim · Film: Dryland
Season
Season 1, Costa Blanca
Pillar
The Soil
Location
Marina Alta mountains, Costa Blanca
He came back to trees his family planted, and started farming without water. He grows native Alicante olives such as blanqueta and alfafarenca. Most of Spain gave up on these varieties because they give smaller harvests.
In 2015, after twenty-five years in graphic arts, Miguel Ángel García González came back to Benifallim, to the groves his family had planted. Today he looks after about twenty-two hectares, mostly on his own.
Benifallim is one of the emptiest villages in the province of Alicante. People have been leaving it since 1857. Above it, on the slopes of the Sierra del Rontonar, olive terraces climb from 680 to 900 metres.
Work with nature, not against it.
Nothing here is irrigated. The trees live on rain, so everything he does is about keeping that water in the ground. Miguel Ángel farms regeneratively. He leaves plants growing between the rows and never ploughs the life out of the soil. Organic matter goes back into the earth, so the soil stays alive and holds the water.
The mountain tells him it works. Wild orchids grow on his terraces and not on the land next door. Deer and wild boar walk through his grove and skip his neighbours'.
The oil tells the same story. Its antioxidant levels are among the highest you can find in olive oil. That is why Michelin-starred chefs buy it, Quique Dacosta and BonAmb in Xàbia among them. They choose an oil made by one man on a mountain forty kilometres inland, in a village most people on the coast have never visited.
Every terrace on that mountain was built by hand, stone on stone. When nobody farms it, the wall falls and the soil washes down the hill. Then scrub moves in, and in August scrub burns. So each terrace Miguel Ángel keeps alive also holds the mountain together. He is a councillor in Benifallim too, working on farming and the environment.
Ask him why he came back and he talks about his daughters. He wants to leave them land in better shape than he found it. Taste the oil, then watch the film to see the hillside it comes from.
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Summary
Miguel Ángel García González is an olive oil maker in Benifallim, Alicante, Spain. Through Rontonar Aceites he left a career in graphic arts to return to his family's mountain groves and rebuild them through regenerative dryland farming, without irrigation, using native olive types that most producers replaced decades ago. He treats the grove as a biodiversity project rather than a crop, and the living soil beneath the trees changes the taste of the oil.
Key Facts
- Business
- Rontonar Aceites · Benifallim · Film: Dryland
- Role
- Olive oil maker
- Location
- Marina Alta mountains, Costa Blanca
- Pillar
- The Soil
- Produces
- Olive oil
- Protects
- Native olive tree varieties; living dryland soil
- Practice
- Regenerative dryland farming, no irrigation
- SDG touchpoints
- 15 · 13 · 2 · 11
- Episode
- Episode 04 · Dryland