Holding a bunch of hops in her hand, Belen presented this plant which was cultivated for decades in the area of Betanzos and, at one stage, becoming an important economic mainstay of the area. She made her presentation along with other protagonists of the Harvest Market Roundtables on the 3rd of September at Santiago’s Teatro Principal.
Belen Matilla is a founding partner of LUTEGA, a cooperative which works towards the recuperation of Galician hops at the Centro de Investigaciones Agrarias de Mabegondo (CIAM) (Mabegondo Agricultural Research centre) alongside Hijos de Rivera. During her talk, she presented the cooperative’s strategy in the search for more producers of this product, in order to recover the economic dynamism surrounding hops in an area in which there “were almost 2,000 producers” at one stage.
Hops can regenerate this dynamism as, in her words, “Galician hops are of the highest quality”, and overall, “there is a market for hops because everyone likes beer”.
You can watch the complete video of Belén Matilla at the first edition of the Harvest Market Roundtables.
LUTEGA webpage
