You may have wondered why olives are so different in colour. And no, it is not due to the varieties of olive tree they come from, which is what one might think at first. The explanation is simple.
The reality is that all olives are green before they ripen. This is when we harvest most of the varieties of olives such as manzanilla, hojiblanca, aloreña, etc., which after a process of cooking and salting will give us the table olives we like so much.
On the contrary, if we let the olive ripen on the tree it will start to turn darker, a process we call “the envero”, taking purple and dark colours and harvesting them at that moment, as is the case with the marcida variety, the Kalamata, etc. Therefore, the different colours of the olives we can see in the market are mainly due to the state of ripeness in which they were picked