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The Hojiblanca Oil Museum

Diputación de Málaga
Museo Aceite Hojiblanca

The Hojiblanca Oil Museum

The Hojiblanca cooperative has created, at its facilities in Antequera (Málaga), an oil museum, whose jewels are a complete seventeenth century mills and two mills from the first and nineteen centuries.

The seventeenth-century mill preserves, along the beam press and balances, all tools of the time to produce oil: the jars (some signed by the master potters), firewoods, ropes, tapes, nails, the mechanism by which oil ran and even earthen wasps nests attached to the beam of the press.
The purpose of the oil cooperative is to collect all objects that make possible to trace the history of the olive oil. All the material is display in a room through panels showing how olive oil has been extracted in ancient times.

The Hojiblanca olive group has sought to recover all the traditional tools related to oil production tasks.

Visitors can also purchase the extra virgin olive oil typical of the Antequera region, with which genuine recipes of Antequera cuisine are prepared, such as the famous “porra” antequerana (bread, tomato and peppers are its principal ingredients) and the “mollete” (muffin bread).

 

Mill from the first century

It appeared in the “Quinta” (a place located between the town of Antequera and the Hojiblanca premises). A room pressing where the olives are squeezed, and a stone counterweight were found . It was a mill press winch (the counterweight to the beam joined by strings). In this archeological site also appeared fossilized bones of olives that were analyzed in the Department of Pomology at the Higher Technical School of Agricultural Engineering and Forestry of the University of Córdoba. The conclusion is that these are morphologically the ancestors of the actual hojiblanca olives.

 

Mill from the nineteenth century

This mill has been donated by the local businessman, Manuel Acedo. This is a press corner or “chapel”, made of oak wood, which has required a great restoration. The press tour on pressing mats (made with dried esparto) which straining on inserted beams on the same press that where moved by the millers, which gave much performance. This type of press was located in small farms but had little effect because it competed with beam presses and hydraulic casting of ist time.

 

Seventeenth-century mill

It is the main piece of the Hojiblanca Museum (donated by the family Cuadra Rojo). The building itself is a reproduction of the mill including the construction techniques. The jars from the cellar, the beam and the stone mill have been placed in the same placement. The mill, which worked with animal traction, is cylindrical and tapered (with a slight slope) and has two parts. These, together with the timber , the basin and the floor of the stone mill, are originals. On the other hand , the most spectacular element is the beam press and quintal (a weight of 100 kilos), with 12.5 meters in length. Ropes, plates , mails, etc. and even earthen nests of wasps have been preserved. After more than three centuries of moth-eaten dry wood, the press still weighs three thousand kilos, which gives an idea of the pressure it could exert.

How to get there

Ctra. de Córdoba, s/n
Zip Code 29200

Discover more about the province of Malaga

Discover more about the province of Malaga