What are olives worth?

Here you see our house (blurred in the middle of the photo!) set in the middle of the olives groves. In times gone by olives were worth considerably more than they are now and indeed if you had olives that you were likely to be relatively well off.

The converse of this is that olives, around harvest time, were likely to be stolen and so houses or outposts like ours set in the middle of olive groves were good vantage points and so used to protect the olives. Our neighbours have told us a story that someone was shot and killed from our house trying to steal olives from the surrounding trees. This was between the two World Wars and so likely to be during the depression years.