Faros Estate from the air: olive groves curving round the lagoon, a white chapel among the rows and the open sea beyond

Sustainability & Biodiversity

Creating Sustainable Olive Groves

Reversing desertification and bringing biodiversity back to barren land.

For 24 years we have been bringing the degraded, desertified land around Sigri back to life: we built terraces, fed the soil with our own compost and planted other trees among the olives. And life returned.

Where we began

We set out to prove that, if we really want to, even degraded and desertified land like this can be regenerated, and turned into a paradise that gives back to the environment, the climate and biodiversity.

Sigri between 1982 and 1990: bare hills round the bay and the peninsula, before the groves — Sigri, 1982–1990

Faros Estate peninsula at Sigri, from the air — Faros Estate today

The journey of regeneration

Nature is an endless teacher, and we are its students.”

Antonis Tirpintiris, CEO of Falcon S.A.

Its wisdom is unlimited, but its time scale is far beyond our own. So everything we have done across the estate comes down to one sentence: we imitated nature, but gave it a human speed.

Creating terraces

We did not invent anything. We simply copied our grandparents, and their grandparents before them. For thousands of years, terraces built by hand in the rocky soils of the Mediterranean have answered the same problems: better aeration, a better spread of water and temperature, more of the sun’s energy reaching the roots, and room for the local flora to grow freely on the slopes.

We worked with the landscape, not against it. We used machinery, because we did not have the time our grandparents had, and each terrace became a strip of life.

New terraces curving round a bare hillside, before planting

An excavator cutting a terrace into the stony ground

Curved terraces planted with olive trees beside the lagoon, from the air

Compost‑based nutrition

Here again, we learned from nature. We have produced thousands of cubic metres of compost from the seaweed the sea washes ashore, manure, branches, leaves and the by-products of our own olive mill.

It is not a recipe; it is fermentation. What nature does in a forest over decades, we accelerate: we pile it, aerate it and let it mature. When it returns to the soil, it does not simply fertilize it; it brings the soil back to life.

What goes into our compost

Posidonia oceanica
Manure
Shredded branches and leaves
Olive mill by-products

Compost spread over a terrace under a clear sky

Posidonia seagrass gathered in heaps on the beach

Reversing desertification by planting

In nature, there is no monoculture. In a natural Mediterranean ecosystem, the olive tree lives together with pomegranate, fig, almond and pine trees and palms, and beneath them all grows a layer of grasses and other plants.

So we planted apple, almond, plum and fig trees, pomegranates, eucalyptus, cypresses, palms and many others. This is not simply a collection of different species; it is a partnership. Each species gives something to the one next to it. We simply stopped separating them.

Apple treesA young apple tree hung with yellow apples
Plum treesA plum tree with dark ripe plums
Fig treesYoung figs on a fig tree, with more fig trees behind
Pomegranate treesA pomegranate tree hung with fruit beside a track
EucalyptusA eucalyptus with a pale trunk in a grassy grove
PalmsA grove of palms on the slope above the sea

Olive trees on terraces covered with green and russet plants

Micro-ecosystems on the terraces

And then came the reward: we moved from a dead landscape to a living one.

On the terraces, small ecosystems began to flourish, with wild grasses, aromatic plants and many others: poppies, orchids, chamomile, thyme, oregano, wild lavender, cistus and many more.