MONEY DOESN’T GROW ON TREES…

…BUT THE GNARLY BARK OF PORTUGAL’S ALENTEJO REGION DOES SPROUT TOURISM DOLLARS, FINDS MARK JONES

I AM TOLD THAT MADONNA made an offer of several thousand euros to a local Portuguese farmer for an olive tree. I can’t verify this story. But it is true that the superstar American singer has bought a ranch in the Alentejo countryside. And I can see why she might be interested: tree tourism is a thing in the Alentejo.

The olive trees around the São Lourenço do Barrocal resort and the nearby village of Monsaraz are certainly special: one has been dated to 437 BC. On a still, rosy evening we went fossicking around the 600,000some square metres of olive groves surrounding São Lourenço. And it is an intense, eerie experience gazing into these knotted, gnarled barks, some of which were around when Plato was a schoolboy. Nearby there are Neolithic tombs where families have lain sleeping for millennia; and a circle of standing stones put up, no one is quite sure why, in about 6,000 BC.

But there’s something else remarkable here. We are in the dry, hot hinterland of rural Portugal, 200 kilometres from the coast, near the Spanish border. And we are tourists. For the entire history of modern Portuguese tourism hardly anyone strayed more than 10 minutes inland. That has changed in no more than a decade. São Lourenço was a semi-deserted farm that had been in the same family for 200 years; was taken into collective ownership during the socialist revolution of the 1970s; then finally returned to the family. The eighth-generation owner, José António Uva, has now created one of the most talked-about rural resorts on the Iberian Peninsula.

The Alentejo is getting increasingly talked about – Madonna isn’t the only one to be attracted by the space, air, food, welcome and low prices (although that last point may be less of a factor for her). And places like this are making tourism boards in hot countries think: does it all have to be about the coast? That’s a question they’re certainly asking in Lisbon, the latest European hotspot to deal with overtourism.

Me, I more or less gave up beaches in about 2003. They’re pleasant enough in a dead, flat kind of way. Look at a palm tree and you see a postcard. Look into an Alentejo olive tree and you see the twists and turns of a whole world.