Join us this fall in celebrating the olive trees and sustaining our self-managed project in Alentejo.
Here we are. As a way of shaking up our wills and bodies, we’re getting ready for another year of picking olives at AKRA, our self-managed project in the depths of our desertified Alentejo.
We live surrounded by 166 singular olive trees, some old enough to have inhabited these lands long before any president or minister, long before any king, duke or lord, and long before the ill-fated birth of the Portuguese state. We want to celebrate them, take care of them, and harvest their juicy fruit to finance the project’s self-sustainability.
And so, we would like to invite you to join us. This fall, from late September through October and November, we’ll be pruning branches, harvesting olives, and weaving life together in these lands that welcome us and teach us so much.
Like an extensive system of deep roots and mycelium, intimately intertwined with each other in a labyrinth of connection and mutual aid, linked by olive trees and humanity, we deeply feel our closeness to Palestine and its people. We want to live this season incorporating our solidarity into every step we take in this geography and celebrating the olive tree as a symbol of resistance to Israeli colonialist occupation and Western imperialism.
The solidarity towards Palestine is deeply rooted in the lived histories of diasporic communities worldwide—people who have been impacted by colonization, occupation, discriminatory immigration policies, and other oppressive systems. From Indigenous peoples fighting for their land and rights to migrant communities navigating racist immigration laws, these shared struggles connect us across borders and fuel our collective pursuit of justice and freedom.
To ease the burden of the pace of work and enjoy leisure time together, we want to have small weekly activities such as reading and writing poetry, drawing, films, conversations, sharing knowledge, some musical moments, writing songs together, etc., exploring the theme of the olive tree-resistance relationship. If you have proposals, share them with us.
The olive season requires different tasks and care at different times, depending on the needs of the olive trees and the land. Before picking olives, the land and the area around the trees must be cleared of suckers and branches, and while the olives are being picked and in the following weeks, the trees must be pruned and the wood processed. Everything in this process is self-organized, and we will need a lot of support at all these stages, and you are welcome to join in at different times of the season.
The land does NOT belong to the people, the people belong to the land.
The current estimate we have for the dates is:
From September 23rd – clearing the land, cutting back brambles and branches
From October 1st – Olive harvest, start pruning
Late October/November – Pruning, processing wood