Well, that’s a very good question and I had to consult my best friend Google to find out. The reason why I decided to find out is because when my husband was refining the actual route for Day 34 (1st May) of the challenge, he said Julia needs to stop today at this olive tree. I laughed and he laughed. We know that the province of Jaén is full of olive trees, we have driven for an hour at least through there and still seen olive trees and more olive trees… So given that, identifying a stop point using an olive tree as the reference point isn’t smart! So we found, guess what,  a white building just along from that “olive tree” and if you have ever been to Andalucia you’ll know there’s a heck of a lot of white buildings too, but luckily we have the GPS coordinates of this one, so we should be okay. This process of refining every single day of Julia’s route is meticulous as we need to travel the fewest kilometres possible, and we need to keep her off busy roads which means sometimes she’ll be running in the campo (countryside) with farmers on their tractors,  the odd animal (maybe an Iberian lynx) and maybe one of two cyclists for company. The answer to the question by the way is: Jaen is the largest producer of Olive Oil in Spain and also world-wide. Just the province of Jaen produces more than the second largest producer country, Italy. With more than 550.000 hectares of olive tree fields and over 60 million trees, it produces 20% of the world’s Olive Oil.

That’s why it takes so long to travel through the province before you leave those olive trees behind. And just in case you don’t know what olive trees look like, I included a photo.