2017Mediterranean Trees - Set

The renowned wild olive groves of Lun occupy the furthest tip of the Island of Pag, from the Cape of Saint Martin to Dudić, and further along Gager, Jakišnica and Stanišće. There are around 80,000 autochthonous trees on the area of around 1,300 hectares. In the vicinity of Lun, some twenty kilometres from the town of Novalja, there are 60 hectares of particularly picturesque olive groves with 1,500 wild olive trees, Olea oleaster linea, grafted onto the domestic olive sort “oblica“. Lun and its olive groves at the far north of the extended part of the Island of Pag are already known in the global scope as a special Mediterranean phenomenon. The Lun olive groves seem to have appeared by some miracle on a rocky terrain where there is almost no arable soil. According to the observations made by Pliny the Elder, when Roman legionnaires set foot on the island, they found unbelievably dense groves of wild olive trees. The olive oil from Lun is mentioned in the first cookbook published in the western world written by Marcus Fabius Apicius. Similar wild olive tree reservations exist only in two other places: Israel and Greece. Lun, however, has a primacy in terms of tree concentration in the area of untouched nature, and in terms of its age. Most of the olive trees are several centuries old, a few hundred trees are more than a thousand years old, and the oldest tree among them is 1,700 years old. The olive trees in Lun are a natural wonder because many of them grow out of rocks and new ones keep sprouting. This is something that does not occur in any other similar olive grove.