News Source: El Viajero, El País
Original Title: Así es la Todolí Citrus Fundació, un cítrico vergel valenciano
Author: Joan Garí
Photography: Mónica Torres
Date: 2 January 2022
This is Todolí Citrus Fundació, a Valencian citrus paradise
A visit to this open-air fruit museum and gastronomic laboratory created by Vicent Todolí in Palmera, plus an excursion to the nearby Vall de Gallinera.
It is early in the morning. In the Bartolí area of Palmera (in the Valencian comarca of La Safor), an intense emulsion of orange blossom surprises the visitor’s respiratory epithelium. Everything is in balance as the air disperses this powerful sweetness and the bees resume an ancestral cycle. In this privileged setting, Vicent Todolí has made available to the public a foundation devoted to the research and dissemination of agricultural, environmental, historical, culinary and industrial issues related to the universe of citrus fruits. What awaits us, then, is a unique sensory walk through 400 varieties of the genus.
Todolí (Palmera, 1958) has returned to his origins to continue doing what he loves most: working in museums. His career includes directing the IVAM in Valencia, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Porto), and Tate Modern in London. He currently combines the directorship of HangarBicocca in Milan with advisory work and his passion for citrus. Between 1982 and 1985 he lived in New York, but paradoxically, his time in the city of skyscrapers led him to rethink his roots. The bittersweet memory of youthful Saturdays when his father forced him to wake up at six in the morning—an essential custom in Valencian farming families—intensified his inner “lycopene,” the enzyme responsible for the deep red color and delicate sweetness of blood oranges. Suddenly, he understood the meaning of those early mornings, and from there emerged the project of returning to the mother land.
His family has traded in oranges for five generations. The first Todolí arrived in La Safor in 1609, following the expulsion of the Moriscos. From the 19th century onward, the area became privileged for citrus cultivation thanks to a particular microclimate: at four in the morning the thermometer may register one degree Celsius, while by four in the afternoon it can easily reach 20 or 22 degrees. This thermal oscillation is ideal for ensuring a good harvest.
Vicent Todolí’s father bought the original orchard of Todolí Citrus Fundació from a trader nicknamed El Burrianero. Today, this space of some 50 hanegadas (more than 41,000 square meters) has traveled back through history toward its origins. The project accelerated while Todolí was still in London. In the first decade of the century, an urban development plan threatened to destroy the site and turn it into buildable land. At that time, more environmentally conscious sectors of Valencian society proclaimed, with a certain melancholic irritation: “We are a country, not a development plan.” The site was saved, and instead of housing estates, all kinds of trees hybridized from the four ancestral varieties—citron, mandarin, pomelo and papeda—now flourish there.
Today Todolí accompanies visitors on a loving walk through this small orchard. He never fails to recall that for the Arabs, the enclosed citrus garden—originating in Persia—was the closest thing to paradise on earth. With running water and birdsong, it represented, in vegetal terms, the three stages of life: youth, maturity and old age.
With a delicacy more Japanese than Western, and a Medici-like collector’s impulse, he cultivates his species using ecological methods and age-old practices. Some trees are more than a century old and stand among dense undergrowth that no one threatens. To restore them from ailments, he has revived practices such as descorar-los (removing diseased parts from the core). The fruits of this passion are used in their entirety: some are prized for their pulp or juice, others for the aromas of their peel. Certain species, such as chinotto, provide a complete pharmacopeia: the flower is sedative, the leaf antacid, and the fruit acts as a liver tonic.
To share all this knowledge, he has sought alliances with renowned chefs. His long-standing connection with Ferran Adrià is notable: everything related to citrus in the Bullipedia comes from these orchards. Together with British pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton, he published the emblematic book Food for Thought, Thought for Food. Many of today’s leading chefs—Ricard Camarena, Quique Dacosta, Andoni Aduriz or Albert Raurich—are also regular visitors to Bartolí. It is a true laboratory dedicated to gastronomic research, systematizing the aromas, textures and pairings that emerge from the orchard. From here come essential oils and marmalades, as well as brilliant combinations of citrus and the boundless imagination of these chefs.
A lost valley
To conclude the visit, Vicent Todolí gives me a box of his products. He does not forget to include his own olive oil brand, Totoli (a play on his surname). This extra virgin olive oil has its own story: it arises from his determination to recover olive groves and other fruit lands in La Vall de Gallinera, in the comarca of La Marina Alta (Alicante). Visiting this lost valley—yet strangely close to the most opulent civilization, Benidorm—is the perfect complement to the visit to Palmera.
No more than half an hour by road separates both paradises. La Vall de Gallinera comprises eight villages with around fifty inhabitants. The capital is Benialí. In Arabic, the prefix ben means “sons of,” making the genealogy of these places unmistakable: Benirrama, Benissivà, Benitaia, Benissili… A marked 14-kilometer route runs through the entire valley, with a maximum elevation gain of 600 meters. It can be walked year-round, but in March it offers the attraction of cherry blossoms, and at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the solar alignment of Penya Foradà—a rare phenomenon during which sunlight passes through a crack in the rock and projects onto the altar of an old Franciscan convent destroyed by an earthquake, stirring much superstition. To regain strength, the area offers several high-quality restaurants, such as Sabors (Font Street 21, Beniaia; 966 40 66 46) or Miró Cuina (Major Street 54, Benirrama).
It was in this magical setting—without phone or electricity—that Todolí devoted himself to the age-old tenacity of working the land. And once again, the rigor of his father’s Saturday morning call at six o’clock took effect. The visit ends, but the penetrating insistence of orange blossom no longer leaves the hypothalamus. For a few hours, we have been in paradise. Because paradises exist, they accept guided visits, have a website—and taste of citrus, of course.
Joan Garí is the author of Cosmopolites amb arrels (Onada Publishing).
