Museumization of olive oil mills: instruments for conservation of the heritage of the olive grove culture

Abstract

Opposed to the historical concept of the olive oil mills as places just for transporting the fruit, milling and olive oil production, the growing interest in its museumization is turning them into gastronomic, cultural and ethnographic points of reference. This study analysed the components of the museumization of Andalusian olive oil mills, using the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) technique and employing the fuzzy-set approach (fsQCA). To that end, it draws on the definition of museum put forward by the more progressive elements of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The main implication from the results is that olive oil mill professionals should adapt the museum offer according to the needs and aspects identified by the causality results of the model, and design museumization strategies with actions tailored to olive oil tourism, in order to more effectively tackle the transformations needed in the sector and enable the conservation of olive cultural heritage.

Importance–performance analysis of olive oil tourism activities: Differences between national and international tourists

“…The original concept referred to farm tourism but was later expanded to cover the need for marketing and specification of olive oil in the European countries of the Mediterranean basin, Australia, the United States and southern cone countries such as Argentina and Uruguay (Millán-Vázquez de la Torre et al, 2017;Orgaz Agüera et al, 2017) Olive oil tourism can be defined as a set of tourist activities that revolve around olive oil. They include multiple rural leisure activities such as visits to olive groves and mills, olive oil tasting sessions and samplings of traditional regional dishes featuring olive oil, combined with other rural, cultural, gastronomic, urban or nature-based activities that allow the visitor to engage with the environment of the region in question (Murgado, 2013;Ortega and Parrilla, 2021).…”

“…Olive oil tourism can be defined as a set of tourist activities that revolve around olive oil. They include multiple rural leisure activities such as visits to olive groves and mills, olive oil tasting sessions and samplings of traditional regional dishes featuring olive oil, combined with other rural, cultural, gastronomic, urban or nature-based activities that allow the visitor to engage with the environment of the region in question (Murgado, 2013; Ortega and Parrilla, 2021).…”

Sustainable Development Goals in the Andalusian olive oil cooperative sector: Heritage, innovation, gender perspective and sustainability.

“…Territorial policies have prioritized some of the SDGs, such as that relating to food availability, and have overlooked others such as biodiversity, soil quality, and the conservation of natural resources (McIntyre et al, 2009). In fact, as Ortega Alonso and Parrilla González (2021) point out in their study of the dimensions of social innovation in agricultural cooperatives, the environmental and technological dimensions are still not sufficiently integrated into the olive oil cooperative sector, despite the fact that some of the main challenges it faces in order to comply with the SDGs are environmental and techno-logical. This relates to the results of previous studies, such as that by Campopiano and Bassani (2021) focusing on the Italian context, which incorporate the fields of social entrepreneurship innovation and cooperativism, and examine the effects of social enterprises' investments in product, technology and process innovation on social and environmental outcomes.…”