It’s a familiar impulse. We travel far and wide looking for something extraordinary, seeing what is right on our doorstep – and in Valencia, Spain, that may mean looking beyond the vast expanse of commercial orange groves.
Just a few kilometers from where I spent every summer, near the city of Gandia, on the coast of Valencia, an internationally renowned art curator has built one of the most remarkable citrus collections in the world.
Vicente Todolí is better known in art circles than agricultural ones. The Spanish curator, who grew up in the country, once directed Tate Modern in London and is now artistic director of contemporary art gallery Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.
In 2012, Todolí started a project of a different kind in Palmera, a village of almost 1,000 inhabitants in the La Safor region of Valencia.
The Todolí Citrus Foundation is dedicated to the research and conservation of the fruit’s biodiversity, with a five-hectare orchard cultivating around 500 rare, historic and once-thought-lost local and international varieties.
Spain is of the world the largest exporter citrus, responsible for around 24% of global exports, with the Valencian community at the center of production. Between September 2025 and January 2026, the region’s citrus shipments were evaluated to 1.4 billion euros.
Varieties most popular in Valencian households each winter include early-season oranges such as Navelina, prized for their sweetness and seedlessness, and later varieties such as Valencia Late, which extend the season into spring and are widely used for juicing.
Valencia’s Garden of Eden
On a bright March morning – cool, cold and bathed in the unmistakable light of Valencia inspired painters like Joaquín Sorolla – I visited the garden. The other arrivals were mostly foreigners, French, British, even Cuban, and only a handful of Valencian locals tagging along.
The taste of citrus fruits. Credit: Ricardo Gómez-Acebo.
Through almost two hours of tasting, smelling and touching, the orchard is a sensory overload.
Finger lime – an Australian variety – explodes like citrus caviar; Citrus maximumthe English pomelo, the ancestor of modern oranges, carries a floral note reminiscent of geranium; bergamot continues with an almost intoxicating scent.
Some fruits, like kumquats, are eaten whole, peel and all. Others surprise simply by the shape, with a fruit that looks like the twisted fingers of the Buddha’s hand.
The ensemble feels like a work of art – citrus fruits as the subject – with the view of the trees framed by the Mondúver range and surrounding fields, composing a landscape that feels almost painted.
It soon becomes less surprising why an international art curator chose to build this particular Valencian citrus garden.
Todoli’s garden in Palmera. Credit: EuractivSofia Sanchez Manzanaro.
Rooted in memory
The project is not a departure from Todoli’s artistic career, but a return to his roots.
Like many Valencians, he comes from a family of citrus growers, in a region where such fruits have long defined the economy and the landscape.
The original family plot, just outside Palmera, was once at risk of being swallowed up by a building project, part of the real estate boom that transformed much of Spain’s Mediterranean coast from the 1990s onwards. Instead, Todolí proposed turning it into a living citrus archive.
The family’s initially modest field continued to expand, absorbing neighboring abandoned plots until it reached almost five hectares. “A little beast that we have to tame,” says Óscar Olivares-Fuster, the Foundation’s technical director, a citrus geneticist and a close collaborator with Todolín.
Vicente Todolí. Credit: Ricardo Gómez-Acebo.
Olivares-Fuster himself is an unusual figure.
By day, he works as a civil servant in nearby Gandia, the town closest to the farm. By evening, he transforms into a gardener and citrus researcher. He has a PhD in citrus and spent several years in the US, another citrus powerhouse.
Todolí, he says, is not a distant patron and has a restless scholarly instinct, constantly digging through archives and historical texts.
This curiosity has led to the recovery of long-forgotten varieties. An example is Valencia Lumiaa fruit associated with the old Kingdom of Valencia that disappeared in Spain, was later traced to Italy through Jesuit writings and French botanical records, and only recently returned to the Spanish Mediterranean thanks to the work of the foundation.
Some of these varieties survived for centuries in the gardens of the Medici family, a powerful banking dynasty from Florence during the Renaissance.
When those gardens were opened to the public in the late 20th century, nurseries were able to propagate their genetic material, making it possible for projects like Todoli’s to bring them back into cultivation in their native land.
Todol’s Citrus at Villa Medici, Rome, Italy. Credit: Caterina Borelli.
More than a museum
For all its beauty, the orchard is far from a museum piece. Her work is scientific and increasingly practical in addressing the challenges of modern agriculture.
Commercial citrus fruits are bred for convenience – easy to peel, seedless, easy to transport. But intense selection has also weakened resilience, Olivares-Fuster explains. Older, more “rustic” varieties, such as those held by the foundation, often carry traits that have been bred from modern fruit.
These traits may be useful when it comes to finding solutions to new diseases, such as citrus greening, which has destroyed orchards in places like Florida, where the geneticist once lived and could find optimal conditions to settle in the Mediterranean.
Climate change is another threat.
In Valencia, the orange blossom now comes roughly two months earlier than when Olivares-Fuster was a child. “Two months in 40 years. That’s huge.” According to him, if citrus fruits are to remain sustainable in the region, growers will need varieties better adapted to heat, stress and changing seasons.
The foundation already works with research centers and universities, and some of its genetic material is already being studied for disease resistance. In those genomes, he says, may lie part of the answer to current and future challenges for citrus growers in Valencia.
Foundation Orchard. Credit: Ricardo Gómez-Acebo.
Warm markets
At the same time, the project explores more immediate ways to support the sector by creating niche markets for rare citrus and opening up opportunities for new farmers in a region struggling with old growers and land abandonment.
One of Todoli’s obsessions, Olivares tells me, is improving the range of high-quality processed products made with Valencian citrus. “It’s Vicente’s disease and he passed it on to me,” he jokes.
Traditionally, Valencia has focused on exporting fresh fruit, while juices and marmalades were made from lower quality products. Todolí’s approach turns this logic on its head by using its exceptional citrus to create top-notch products.
Olivares is currently working on a citrus-based vermouth with a producer in Catalonia, in northeastern Spain. Another collaboration has produced a small-batch gin using five non-commercial citrus varieties.
Citrus food products and beverages. Credit: Todolí Citrus
I leave the garden holding what can reasonably be described as an unnecessary amount kumquat marmalade, along with an equally unjustifiable amount of canarone cider chocolate.
Once these niche markets are developed, the foundation looks for small farmers – often young – who can grow the fruit, making the rare varieties commercial.
“I really like these projects,” says Olivares. “But in the end, there has to be a product and someone has to grow it. It doesn’t have to be us.”
Todoli’s garden may not be so much about artistic, old and rare fruit, but about seeing the agriculture of the future. And it suggests that the correction of the future may lie not in the discovery of something new, but in the rediscovery of what was already there.
(adm, jp, mm)
