Belluga Gourmet
Serrana de Espadán, a variety you find almost nowhere else.
Their products →
A house, a region
Segorbe sits inland, in the Alto Palancia, in the province of Castellón. The town once had nearly eighty oil mills. In one of them, from the twentieth century, the Olive Oil Museum of Segorbe opened in 2006, and it went on to receive the First National AEMO Prize for promoting and spreading olive culture.
Belluga Gourmet's shop is inside that museum. It is run by José Luis and Teresa, grandchildren of Luis and Carmen, farmers. Selling oil and telling where it comes from are, for them, the same job.
Their family collection carries household names: El Abuelo, from century-old dry-farmed Serrana de Espadán trees; Claudia, from Koroneiki; Martín, from Frantoio grown on the irrigated land around Segorbe. In Switzerland we start with two: the First bottle and the Selección tin.
How they work
Serrana de Espadán is the olive of that place: native to the Alto Palancia and the Alto Mijares, around the Sierra Calderona, and hardly found anywhere else. That is what sets it apart from the other oils on our shelf: La Chinata works with Manzanilla Cacereña, Almazara Terraverne with Hojiblanca, Finca La Barca comes from La Vera. This one, almost nobody has tasted outside those mountains. The two formats we bring in: the green 500 ml bottle with its white cap, and the gold 250 ml tin, opaque, letting no light through. Store them cool and dry, away from the stove, and finish them within a few months once open.
Why we chose them
My father is from Sueca, and our shelf already held oil from Extremadura and Andalusia — that is where I see most of the Spanish oils that cross my desk coming from. I wanted something from the Spanish Levante that resembled nothing else I sell, and Serrana de Espadán is exactly that: an olive hardly found outside those mountains in Castellón. What settled it was where I found them. José Luis and Teresa are the grandchildren of Luis and Carmen, farmers, and they keep their shop inside the Olive Oil Museum of Segorbe, an old mill among the eighty or so the town once had. The 250 ml tin struck me as the right way in: it costs little, it fits any kitchen, and it is finished before the oil ages. If you like it, the bottle is waiting.
