Before settling down for good in the South and starting off the journey of La Cultivada, I made a stop in Barcelona to visit one of those irreplaceable, unconditional friends: Victoria Bermejo.
One summer afternoon in her apartment overlooking Plaça Tetuán, we sat searching for a name for the future olive oil brand. Victoria and I – with Fernando Corripio’s thesaurus in hand – began playing with words until, finally, the name found us.
The verb embraced us, turned into a noun and then into an adjective: to cultivate the land, cultivated people, cultivated soil, cultivated olives, the cultivated woman, the cultured and the cultivated, the cultivated owl… the cultivated olive tree…
There was no better place and no better midwife than Victoria, a writer of stories and novels.
Victoria loves words and cultivates them from the moment she wakes up; not a day goes by without a genuine emotion blossoming from under her fingers as she types at her maple desk.
La Cultivada! And that’s when and where the name was born, helped along by the best midwife, surrounded by books and in broad daylight.
Did you know that the word “agriculture” gave birth to the term “culture” and that cult means cultivation or cultivated?
Right then and there, I dedicated La Cultivada to my grandparents, inspired by the goddess Athena and her civilising vision, who with her gift of an olive tree won the city of Athens. Do you know the story?
Planting trees is culture — after all, they’ve published every book in the world.
And the name? That was just the beginning…
Elena Vecino
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