"This is turning out to be another bad year, to put it mildly," olive farmer Francisco José García de Zúñiga says. "We've had two years of drought in a row, 2022 and 2023, and two years of bad harvests."
For 1,000 years, homes dug into a desert cliff have sheltered olive farmers and sheep herders from summer heat and winter cold. But an exodus threatens its future. “We are left alone here.”
Extreme weather is making olive oil production far more erratic just as global demand is growing. A summer heat wave in Europe was the latest calamity.
