The Ancient Olive Groves
Living heritage · Guercif province and beyond
Across this region there are olive groves nobody has counted. Trees with trunks a man cannot reach around, standing where the mountain or the river put them, worked by families who have never seen their name on a bottle. We are walking these groves one at a time and writing down what we find — where they are, how they grow, what shape they are in, and what they are called by the people who farm them.
Each grove below is a place we have been. The record is honest about what we do not know: we put no age on a tree we cannot date, and we say so when we cannot tell how a grove began.
Hmiddate
Middle Atlas · 33.8118 N · 3.9625 W
Monumental trunks on the high ground, and the first grove we filmed.
Kaf El Ghar
Pre-Rif, north of Taza · 34.5281 N · 4.2241 W
A landscape of trees grafted onto wild olive — a grove that grew out of the forest.
Souihla
Melloulou valley · 34.1117 N · 3.6965 W
Valley-floor trees fed by the silt the river leaves behind.
Tikhyamine
Upper Melloulou gorge · 33.9475 N · 3.7631 W
A kilometre of tall, irrigated olives in a gorge — picked from up in the crowns.
One river, from the gorge to the plain
Two of these groves sit on the same water. The Oued Melloulou rises in the Middle Atlas and runs north to the Moulouya, and we have now walked it high in its gorge at Tikhyamine and down on the valley floor at Souihla. The same river, the same watershed, two entirely different places to be an olive tree — and more of that corridor still to walk.
Why we do this
Much of what this region produces leaves it with no name attached. A grove that has been documented — located, described, photographed, its producers known — can be sold as what it is rather than as anonymous volume. That is the whole of our argument, and this record is the evidence for it.
Know a grove we should see?
This record is far from finished, and the best leads come from the people who live beside these trees. If you know a grove that belongs here, tell us where it is.