The Seville oranges

When visiting the beautiful city Seville you can’t ignore the orange trees, they are everywhere! You’ll find them on every corner of the street and especially on squares in the city center. There are around 25.000 of them in Seville. In spring, the orange trees provide a lovely smell through the streets of the city and the rest of the year the oranges create a beautiful street scene, because of their remarkable bright orange color. 

Free oranges?

If you see pictures of the Seville oranges, or if you see them in real life, they just look like normal sweet oranges, but there is a big difference. Unfortunately! If you were thinking about eating free oranges on your city trip to Seville, we have to disappoint you, because you can’t eat these oranges. In addition to Seville oranges, the oranges are also known as bitter oranges and sour oranges. These names refer to their taste, so they’re unsuitable for eating because of the fact that the peel is very bitter and the pomace is very sour. 

The best marmalade! 

But what do they do with the oranges, if you can’t eat them? Another name (yes, this orange has many names) for this orange is marmalade orange. So with the Seville orange, you can make the best marmalade! But the locals in Seville don't, or barely consummates marmalade. This is why one exports once a year a big amount of marmalade oranges to Great-Britain to be processed there into marmalade. Because It’s a product that is largely consumed in the British market. But marmalade is not the only product that contains the oranges from Seville. Also, different kinds of drinks like liqueurs, for example, orange bitter and beers, like wheat beer contain the oranges. 

El Copero

Nowadays one has also started a new project in which one uses the oranges, this time to produce electricity for the wastewater treatment plant. But how can an orange produce electricity? Well, one collects all the oranges that have fallen from the trees and bring them to El Copero, the wastewater treatment plant in Dos Hermanas. There, ten thousands of pounds oranges are used to make biogas, which is used to produce electricity for El Copero.