"Tafones"
10/01/2014 17:59:08
"Mallorca has its own facilities to make oil called tafones. Though primitive, they have everything needed to obtain this very important product for the island.
See our wood engraving for an interior of a tafona, where the first thing that calls our attention is the millstone itself (el trull) used to ground the olives. It tends to be located on one end of the tafona, generally in a special place, near the stable used for the mule in the operation and always close to the graners (“granaries”), accessible via large doors. The olives are taken from the latter in baskets (senalles) and unloaded in the tremuja, a type of conical trull. The paste obtained from the olives goes from the mola to the submola, consisting of various stones which form a type of conical basin around the first mola. From there is the so-called emportinador, or pile of rocks in a rectangular shape and not far from the trull which occupies the centre of the tafona.
Two men called manobres oversee the filling of esparto grass trays (esportins) with the olive paste. In some, there is a wooden drawer shaped like a quadrangular pyramid whose narrow vertex faces downward and which, along with the central beam (l’arbre), turns at the same tame as the millstone. The name, trull, is applied to the entire apparatus turned by the animal. As it turns, the olives fall through the lower opening in the tremuja and land on the mola, laying horizontally and made of one single stone, and foundation and centre of the entire facility where they’re ground."
Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria. Las Baleares por la palabra y el grabado. Majorca: General Part. Ed. Sa Nostra, Caja de Baleares. Palma de Mallorca. 1982.
