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by Reason077 835 days ago
I have a friend who moved to Portugal and acquired ~15 olive trees with the farmhouse he purchased. (And also oranges, lemons, pomegranates, plums, and grape vines). All for less than the price of a small flat in London.

It took him and his girlfriend a few days of work, but they harvested all the olives by hand (using rakes and nets), took them to a local olive mill and for around €50 (flat fee for any amount of olives up to a certain batch size) got back a 50-litre barrel filled with some of the most delicious extra virgin olive oil I've ever tasted. At least a year's supply for them.

Fast fibre internet there too despite being in the countryside. I don't think he's coming back!

4 comments

I recently bought land with over 100 olive trees in Portugal. We use the stuff a lot but this will tie us over and with current prices, the monetary savings are relevant.

Another advantage; picking and trimming finally takes me away from the computer at least for a while. Picking takes quite a while, but it’s fun.

We have fiber for the house and Starlink for the land. 0 outings (that I know off) on either so far (knock on would).

> a 50 litre barrel ... At least a year's supply for them

That's an unfathomable amount of olive oil to me! To finish off the barrel within a year between the two of them, they'd each have to be consuming 68 mL (4.6 tablespoons) of olive oil daily, providing 62 grams of fat.

That is a pretty normal quantity for a human.

For instance I control carefully the kind and the amount of fat that I eat. About 90% of my daily intake of fat comes from 50 mL of EV olive oil + 20 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil.

There is a fraction of cold-pressed sunflower oil in order to provide enough linoleic acid and enough vitamin E. Eating only olive oil would require at least 100 mL daily, which would provide too many calories for a sedentary lifestyle.

So, with 70 mL of oil per day plus small amounts of fat from the rest of the food you get from fat about a third of the daily intake of energy for a sedentary lifestyle, which corresponds with most recommendations.

I consume about 67 mL of olive oil per day; I buy 6 liters of olive oil every 90 days. I'm type II diabetic, diet-controlled, which means I have to get my calories mostly from fats because I'm on a restricted carbohydrate diet.
The internet is good when it works. Mine has been out for a week. Motherf-ing Altice...
Oh so Altice also exists there? SFR in France is now legendary for all of its problems.

My parents paid for a fiber subscription for years before understanding that it wasn't using the fiber since it wasn't working, and when they did know, SFR sent us technicians to try to fix the problem. Each one of them came, and got to the same conclusion: "Oh, it doesn't work, I (the technician) should call someone in SFR and come back next week", and then proceeded to not come back the next week. 10 times. 10 technicians came and told me the same thing; even one of them told me that "Just switch to another provider it's not probably going to be resolved"

SFR was their first mistake, alas.
Did they need some kind of visa to do that? or were they already EU citizens?
He's a UK citizen and his girlfriend is a Portuguese local, who he met after he moved there. I believe there are visas you can apply for if you can show you're investing a certain amount of money into Portugal (buying property, starting a business, etc).