Juan keeps his organic olive oil in a little stone hut at the mouth of a tunnel in a Catalan hillside. “We also use this as a storeroom, because it’s always about 15 degrees in here. It’s like a little stone hut set into the mountain, so it works really well for keeping the oil, for keeping wine and all that,” he told the YouTuber who came to film him. Fifteen degrees Celsius is about 59\u00b0F.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Behind him the tunnel goes about 49 feet (15 meters) straight into the rock. “At the end of the mine, little drops of water keep falling from the mountain,” he said, and they run down a cement ramp into a pond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was 26 and living in Barcelona when he left. Now he is 29 and sells his own olive oil with an organic certificate, and the farm’s garden, by his count, supplies 80 percent of the vegetables they eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this comes from a 31-minute video by Spanish YouTuber Arnau Serrado<\/a>, shot on the farm in February and posted on February 22. It has more than 186,000 views. Juan speaks Spanish in it, and the quotes here are our translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Well, I’m Juan, I’m 29, I was born in Colombia and I came here to Catalonia when I was 4,” he says at the start. “I’ve been living in this house for 3 years. It’s a house we bought in 2020, we’d bought it right before the pandemic, and it’s rural land, but there was already a home on it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part of it was the price of a city apartment. “I was in Barcelona and it was like, now find myself a job, have to pay a thousand-something a month for an apartment, I didn’t want to live alone,” he said. “So I thought, well, better than being there, I’ll make my living here.” A thousand euros is roughly $1,120 at the European Central Bank’s October 12 rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He comes back to it later. “You find yourself there in an apartment, and I have friends who are paying 800 euros for a 40-square-meter apartment and so on, you know? And I had the chance to come here and I wanted to make the most of it.” That’s about $895 for some 430 square feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’re in Tarragona, and this land has 8 hectares of olive trees,” he said, about 20 acres. “Now we produce oil, and we have our own brand of oil, and we sell it with organic certification and all that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The brand is Comuna 96, which is also what he calls the farm. Its page describes it as an agroecological farm in Duesaig\u00fces, a village in Tarragona province.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The farm is really three plots bought at different times. The first, with the house, was about 10 acres (4 hectares), bought in 2020. Another, a terraced vegetable plot with olive trees bought two years ago, came from an older woman in the village whose children did not want it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This land, which is the garden, and this olive area, in total it’s about, I think, 3 hectares, and it cost 15,000 euros,” Juan said. “I mean, 15,000 euros is pretty good, that’s what a second-hand car costs you, and sometimes a car costs even more.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n That works out to about $16,770 for 7.4 acres, with sheds, two ponds and water all year. He says her family had looked after it for more than 100 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I have this land registered with the CCPAE, which is the organic certification,” he said, referring to the Catalan council for organic farming<\/a>. So if he wanted to sell the vegetables in shops with the organic label, he could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Olive growers elsewhere in the Mediterranean are trying their own cheap fixes, like spreading sheep wool to improve olive grove soils<\/a> during drought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tunnel is what Juan calls the mine, a horizontal well. Its water goes through a treatment unit and up to a pond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We get the electricity from the solar panels, the water from the land itself, 80 percent of the vegetables from our garden, and, well, later the idea is to also get the meat and all that,” he said. There are about 15 hens and a rooster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a similar formula to an Italian family that lived in a forest with solar panels, well water and a vegetable garden<\/a>, or a family building an earthen house in the desert on solar power and rainwater<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He doesn’t pretend it was easy. “The first year is a bit hard because there’s a lot of information, everyone tells you something different, but until you do it on your own is when you really learn, right? Like with trial and error.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The oil isn’t his only income. “If you’re young and you’re willing, there’s work, there’s quite a lot of work because there’s a shortage of young people, right?” Juan said. “So I, for example, picked up a 2,000-euro van, an old van, and here I’ve gotten work transporting animals, selling firewood, doing moves and a whole bunch of other things too. And there are a lot of older people who also need care, and there are quite a few job offers, honestly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The van cost about $2,240. He also sells succulent arrangements and pieces made from pine and olive wood, and says the crafts have done well at fairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For people who want a paycheck, he pointed to Reus, a city about 20 minutes away by car. “There are a lot of young people here in the village who are 35 and work in Reus, they’re electricians, and then they come back here to the village and they have their house,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where he does spend money, he says, is on trips back to the city. “When I go to Barcelona to see my friends there, that’s when you go out to dinner, for a drink and so on, you spend more than 150 or 100 euros in a weekend, and maybe that lasts you two weeks here.” That’s about $110 to $170.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then he brought up a neighbor. “I have a neighbor who has a house with more than a hectare of garden, with olive trees and so on, and he pays rent and it costs him 400 a month, and he lives with his partner, they pay 200 each, and they have a house of 200 square meters.” Four hundred euros is about $450, and 200 square meters is around 2,150 square feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Up among the century-old olive trees, he turned to city housing. “People in the city are paying 700 euros for a room,” he said, about $780. “Young people can’t take on a mortgage either, with the mortgages there are now for apartments and houses. So, look, it’s about looking for the other way, right?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every figure here is Juan’s own, said on camera, and nobody has checked his books. He didn’t say what the oil brings in or what the farm costs to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 80 percent is vegetables only. He still goes to the supermarket, which he admits “is a bit expensive.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also didn’t start from scratch. The house was bought in 2020, before he moved in, and the olive trees were already there. Someone arriving with no land would be doing a very different math.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even the timeline varies. He says three years in the video, and a July 30 piece in El Espa\u00f1ol<\/a> that retold his story said four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early in the video, Juan said that 60 years ago this was normal. “In the countryside, families always lived there, they had their garden, their hens, and now it’s seen as something novel when it’s something our ancestors had been doing for thousands of years.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Image: Arnau Serrado \/ YouTube<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Juan keeps his organic olive oil in a little stone hut at the mouth of a tunnel in a Catalan … <\/p>\nA rent he did not want to pay<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Olive trees came with the land<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Water from a tunnel in the hill<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A cheap van found him work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Weekends in Barcelona cost more<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What his numbers leave out<\/h2>\n\n\n\n