Day of visit: 3.11.2023
A cold and wet day in November. Heavy squalls of the hurricane cyclone ´Claran`are sweeping across the saffron fields of Carlos Fernández in Villarrobledo, a small town in the autonomous province of Castile-La Mancha. 200 km southeast of Madrid. Climate conditions, that turn the harvest of the first few saffron blossoms yet open into a hard and strenuous labor. Now, in the first days of the harvesting season, the harvesters comb the fields three times a day for open flowers of the saffron crocus:
Saffron farmer Carlos Fernández shows us, that the majority of the crocus plants are still in the soil, just beginning to develop their crocus blossoms:
The picked flowers are straightaway transported into the production hall. Here they are laid out on long tables to be processed.
The most difficult task in saffron production is separating the fragile stamens from the freshly harvested flowers. A delicate job for Caridad, Carlos Fernández’s mother, and her employees from the village of Villarrobledo:
Then the fresh saffron is weighed and the moisture is removed in a special device:
To this day, the millennia-old culture of saffron cultivation is carried out exclusively by hand. At Carmín Azafrán, owned by Carlos Fernández in Villarrobledo, they do this in a cycle of three years -mainly because of botanical reasons: By nature the saffron flower is sterile. That is why there are no seeds. Reproduction therefore is vegetative, through small corms (= new bulbs) that form over time. After three years of growing and flowering, the bulbs are removed from the soil by hand. Carlos Fernández explains the annual cycle in his saffron culture as follows:
For Carlos Fernández, owner of “Azafrán Carmín“, CrowdFarming.com is a very important partner in the distribution of his saffron:
Be the first to comment