When Jose Soriano was a child, the hills near the village of Sarrion in Spain’s remote and sparsely populated eastern province of Teruel were mostly uncultivated, covered in brush and rocks.
They are now home to rows of oak trees where large quantities of black truffles — one of the most exclusive and expensive delicacies on the planet — grow underground, nestled in their roots.
“Everything here revolves around truffles,” said Soriano, who has 30 hectares (74 acres) of land near Sarrion, home to about 1,200 people.
This athletic 38-year-old quit his job as a forest ranger a few years ago to devote himself fully to growing black truffles, which grow among the roots of trees planted two decades ago by his father-in-law.
“It was complicated to do both at the same time,” Soriano said as he petted his dog, Pista. “In the end you win more with truffles.”
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The setter is trained to hunt the subterranean fungi, which look like button balls of wet slime and provide a unique flavor when added to dishes.
Production of “tuber melanosporum,” the scientific name for black truffles, has soared in recent years in Spain, which is now the world’s leading producer of the delicacy.
Often called “black diamonds,” truffles can fetch up to 1,500 euros ($1,600) per kilogram.
“The land here is very poor. It doesn’t grow much. But surprisingly this type of soil likes the truffle,” Daniel Brito, head of the Teruel Association of Truffle Growers, said of the province’s limestone soil.
“It’s a lifeline”
Spain produced about 120 tons of black truffles in 2022.
This is four times more than the 30 tonnes harvested in Italy and three times the 40 tonnes produced in France, which until recently was the world’s top producer.
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And about 80 percent of Spain’s black truffles come from the area around Sarrion, which has 8,000 hectares of black truffle cultivation, making it the largest source in the world.
The village holds an annual fair dedicated to black truffles, which Brito said were exported from the area “all over the world.”
Extensive irrigation is behind that success, he said, along with the widespread use of controlled mycorrhizae — a technique that creates a symbiotic relationship between the truffle fungus and the tree’s root.
Truffles extract sugar and water from the roots of their host tree and in return feed soil nutrients back to the tree.
Under the right conditions this allows for “a much larger crop” of black truffles, Brito said.
For the region’s villages, which, like much of the Spanish hinterland, have struggled with a shrinking population as people move to urban areas in search of more opportunities, the boom in truffle production has been something of a miracle.
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“For those who want to stay here, it’s a lifeline,” said Sarrion’s 32-year-old mayor, Estefania Donate.
‘A lot of work’
Before the truffle boom began in the 2000s, the village was losing its younger residents due to a lack of jobs and prospects.
Now the population is growing, with the village school seeing a jump in enrollment.
“There’s very little unemployment here … It’s more housing that we’re missing,” Donate said.
“The truffle brings life… We even attract a few tourists,” he added.
However, the success of the truffle sector remains fragile.
Truffles can’t go long without water and “love the cold,” so changing weather patterns — with warmer winters and less rain — is “worrisome,” Brito said.
“We managed to stabilize production thanks to irrigation,” he added.
Cultivating the truffle “requires a lot of work and investment” because the trees only start producing it after 10 years and, like all fungi, truffles are “unpredictable”.
Source: AFP