The Old Olive Trees of Kaf El Ghar
Living heritage · Pre-Rif, north of Taza
At Kaf El Ghar, in the pre-Rif highlands north of Taza (34.5281 N · 4.2241 W), you leave the tarmac and drive for fifteen minutes through olive groves that never break. Not an orchard planted in rows, but a whole landscape of old trees — massive, many-trunked, standing where the mountain put them. This is the second terroir we have documented, and it changed how we think about the first.
The Old Olive Trees of Kaf El Ghar — 51 s
The groves at Kaf El Ghar — pre-Rif, north of Taza
Trees that grew out of the forest
The olive groves of the Rif and pre-Rif were not, for the most part, planted. Researchers working across northern Morocco have documented a very different practice: as farmers cleared land, they spared the wild olive — the oleaster — and grafted cultivated olive onto the living wild tree. The grove grew out of the forest rather than replacing it.
Farmers hold that trees grafted this way are more vigorous, better able to withstand wind and drought, and give better oil — they credit the deep taproot of the wild rootstock. The shapes at Kaf El Ghar are characteristic of that tradition: enormous irregular trunks, several stems rising from one base, trees spaced by the terrain rather than by a planting plan.
Two trees, two names
The language of these mountains keeps the two trees apart. Across Moroccan Berber, variations of azitoun and tazitount name the grafted tree, while azemmour is the original tree of the whole area — the one Moroccan Arabic calls zebbouj. The name of the grafted tree shifts from one region and valley to the next; the original tree keeps a single name everywhere.
That distinction is not a curiosity. It is precisely the one the grafter works with: azemmour below, azitoun above, joined on a single trunk. A landscape needs a word for each only if its people have spent generations telling them apart.
An old country for olives
Morocco is one of only three places in the whole Mediterranean where the wild olive is thought to have survived the ice ages — a refuge, alongside the Levant and the Aegean, from which the cultivated olive was drawn. Amazigh communities were working olives here long before the Phoenicians arrived. These groves belong to a practice with real depth, in a landscape that has carried olives for a very long time.
From volume to value
Identifying, documenting, and celebrating the old olive groves of the region is at the heart of our work. Kaf El Ghar is one of many terroirs we are documenting. Our goal is to connect every bottle to a place we have walked, a producer we know, and a story we can stand behind.
What we don't claim. We make no claim about the age of any individual tree. Olive wood cannot be reliably ring-counted, and the tree regenerates endlessly from its own base, so the honest answer is that nobody knows. We would rather say so than guess.