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Olive Atlas
The World of the Olive
Guides › Olive Oil › Olive Atlas

Olives grow in a narrow ribbon of the world — the Mediterranean-climate latitudes where hot dry summers meet mild wet winters. Here is that world in full: who grows the olive, the great varieties of every country and how to tell them apart, and the numbers behind the fruit and its oil.

The olive world in numbers

~3.6M t
world olive-oil / year
~1 billion
olive trees on Earth
~11M ha
planted worldwide
~90 / 10
split: oil vs table

Who produces the most olive oil?

Approximate recent annual production, thousand tonnes:

Spain1419Turkey505Tunisia340Greece250Italy248Portugal177Morocco130Syria/Levant110Algeria95

Spain alone makes around 40% of the world's olive oil; the top six countries make over 80%. Figures swing widely year to year with drought and alternate bearing. (Source: International Olive Council.)

Where the olive grows

Each gold pin is an olive-growing country, sized by production. The faint gold bands are the olive-climate latitudes. Tap a country to see its varieties below.

Spain · ~1419,000 tTurkey · ~505,000 tTunisia · ~340,000 tGreece · ~250,000 tItaly · ~248,000 tPortugal · ~177,000 tMorocco · ~130,000 tSyria/Levant · ~110,000 tAlgeria · ~95,000 tEgypt · ~35,000 tArgentina · ~30,000 tAustralia · ~22,000 tUsa · ~18,000 tFrance · ~5,000 tCroatia · ~4,000 t

The world's olive varieties

A field guide to the great cultivars — search by name, filter by country or use, and read how to recognise each one.

What is olive oil made of?

Olive oil · fatty acids
Oleic acid (a monounsaturated fat) makes up 55–83% of olive oil — the heart of its health story. The rest is mostly palmitic and linoleic acid, plus the polyphenols and vitamin E that give real extra virgin oil its bitterness, pepper and antioxidant power. (Per tablespoon: ~119 kcal, 13.5 g fat, ~10 g of it monounsaturated.)

And the olive itself?

Ripe olive · composition
A ripe olive is about half water and a fifth oil, with the stone accounting for much of the rest, plus a little sugar, fibre and the bitter compound oleuropein that must be cured away before eating. (See Table Olives.)

Sources: International Olive Council (production, table olives, variety catalogue); USDA FoodData Central; Codex/IOC trade standards. Variety recognition notes are representative ampelographic descriptions. Figures are approximate and vary by harvest year.