🫒 Cornicabra

Cornicabra is a Spanish oil olive cultivar, second in the country by area. It is planted on more than 270,000 hectares, mostly in the provinces of Ciudad Real and Toledo, and also in Madrid, Badajoz and Cáceres. According to the “Montes de Toledo” olive oil specification, the cultivar's home is Mora in the province of Toledo.

The fruit is strongly elongated and asymmetric, with a pointed tip, and medium purple when ripe. The name is formed from the Spanish words for “horn” and “goat”. The cultivar has more than twenty other names — Cornal, Corneja, Cornezuelo — and is often simply called “common” or “local”.

Cornicabra flowers late, comes into bearing late and ripens late. Yields are high but irregular from year to year. The fruit holds very firmly to the branches, so machine harvesting is difficult. The cultivar is valued for its high oil yield and for the oil's flavour and stability; the firm flesh is also used for table olives.

The tree is well adapted to poor soils and dry, cold places — such as the stony land of Toledo. As far back as 1977, Cornicabra occupied 99.6% of the olive area of the province of Toledo. The cultivar's weak points are olive knot, verticillium wilt, peacock spot and the olive fly.

Why it matters to you. A bottle of PDO “Montes de Toledo” olive oil holds Cornicabra only, because the specification permits no other cultivar. To spot a genuine one, look for the words “DOP Montes de Toledo”, a seal and a numbered back label from the control body. “Aceite Campo de Montiel” and “Aceite de Madrid” are blends in which Cornicabra is just one of the main cultivars; in the Madrid oil it must make up at least 80% together with Castellana and Manzanilla Cacereña.