Portugal’s olive oil production reached 160,000 tonnes in the current season – and quintupled in the last 26 years – but experts meeting in the Alentejo town of Moura today believe the sector can still grow in volume and value.
“Since the beginning of the century, we have quintupled average production,” Manuel Norte Santo, chair of the Alentejo Olive Oil Study and Promotion Centre (CEPAAL) told Lusa, at the National Olive Oil congress
The 160,000 tonnes of production for the 2025-2026 season represents €700 million for the country, he said, “considering the average value of bulk olive oil sales”.
Although bulk sales still account for more than 50% of production, mostly for export, CEPAAL wants to create a “Portuguese olive oil umbrella brand” to increase value. (An umbrella brand being a single brand used to market a group of related products.)
The CEPAAL chair said this brand would “increase value and visibility, allowing the country to retain that €700 million, and sell more with a Portuguese stamp.”
“What we want is for this more than 50% not to be sold in bulk, but to be packaged, sold and on shelves with the Portuguese olive oil brand, keeping that added value here instead of in Spain or Italy,” said Norte Santo, explaining that the sector has seen “a major transformation in production, in both olive groves and state-of-the-art mills” but the country “often ignores this commercial advantage, and the economic value it can retain by creating brands.”
Portugal’s olive grove area has also “expanded sharply,” he added.
Portugal now has “350,000 hectares of olive groves, mostly in the Alentejo region, specifically Baixo Alentejo,” thanks to the irrigation perimeter created by the Alqueva reservoir (Europe’s largest artificial lake).
“There is still room for growth and clear potential for that. We also need to replicate in other parts of the country what we are doing in the Baixo Alentejo,” said the CEPAAL chair.
Gonçalo Moreira, project manager at Olivum (Association of Olive Growers and Mills of Portugal), told Lusa on the sidelines of the same congress, that despite a 10% drop in production compared to 2025, “new groves and productive areas” are constantly entering production.
“We were the first country to replace modern olive groves with even more modern ones,” he said. “Recently, we have been converting vase-shaped groves, which had up to 800 trees per hectare, into hedgerow groves, which have more trees and higher production capacity.”
Moreira believes these new hedgerow groves will soon cause the production curve to spike again, “as it did in the first 20 years” of this century – and this will not even require irrigated land.
“We can install new hedgerow groves even without irrigation,” he stressed. “Producers are showing strong interest in this model because, even without water, we can establish rain-fed groves if the land conditions allow it.”
Olivum shares positive outlooks for the coming years: “Portugal’s record olive oil output reached 206,000 tonnes, and we believe that, within three to five years, we can reach around 300,000 tonnes,” said Moreira – adding that this would place Portugal “second in Europe’s production ranking, and third or fourth worldwide.”
Source: LUSA
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