Media: Levante _ Opinión
Original title: Complicidades. Todolí Citrus
Author: Carlos Marzal
Photography: Adolf Boluda
Date: 9 May 2026
When anomalies become customary, we tend to say that we are dealing with a tradition, because we prefer to believe that the affairs of the world follow logical patterns rather than surrendering to anomalous behaviour, which does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and wherever it wants.
It has always seemed to me that the region of La Safor represents a cultural anomaly that has turned the abundance of outstanding writers into a habit. This may, of course, be due to the literary tradition itself, but it remains anomalous, because literature, however one looks at it, is a happy eccentricity in the world. If I limit myself to Oliva, without attempting to make an exhaustive catalogue, I immediately think of one of the great figures of the Spanish Enlightenment, Gregorio Mayans; of Francisco Brines, a classic of twentieth-century Spanish poetry; of Enric Sòria, Joan Navarro, Àngels Gregori and Josep Lluís Roig. Repeated coincidences become the habit of coincidence, something that never ceases to surprise us.
In my ethnographic investigations, I have attributed this abundance of good writers to two fundamental causes: the convergence of the winds coming from the Sierra de Gallinera with the breeze arriving from the beaches of Oliva, and, above all, to the miracles of the town’s patron saint, the Mare de Déu del Rebollet.
However, today I know that there is a third decisive factor in all this literary bustle: the consumption of citrus fruits since the time of the Arabs.
To foster all this blessed citrus and cultural extravagance, Vicente Todolí, a resident of Palmera, created the Todolí Citrus Foundation. It is the open-air garden cultivating the greatest number of citrus varieties in the world: around five hundred.
Many of you will know Vicente Todolí because he has been the Artistic Director of very famous contemporary art museums: the IVAM, the Serralves Museum in Porto, and the Tate Gallery in London. Vicente could have spent his money on any of the banalities on which we usually spend it, but instead he decided to build a citrus garden to oppose a P.A.I. urban development plan that threatened to destroy his family orchard.
His Foundation is a work of art in its own right — a slow and delicate undertaking whose purpose is to explain and ennoble human life — but with the added advantage that it can be smelled, tasted and eaten. As if that were not enough, one day each year he gathers nearly five hundred people in his garden to listen to contemporary poets in an open-air recital among pummelos, grapefruits, oranges, lemons and citrons. He has called this event Poecítrics.
In Japan, the name Vicente Todolí would be associated with some Shinto spirit and he would be worshipped at New Year. In Valencia, some of us — increasingly more — proudly celebrate the existence of his anomaly.
