Associació de Varietats Locals

The Associació de Varietats Locals is a non-profit organisation set up in 2002 on the initiative of farmers, technicians and scholars of agrobiodiversity in the Balearic Islands, and works mainly in Mallorca. It currently has more than 400 members.

The organisation works to recover local varieties of vegetables, legumes, cereals and fruit trees, as well as the associated farming knowledge. Since 2011, the association has been developing a project to multiply and distribute local varieties with the aim of raising awareness and promoting their consumption. To this end, it has offered some local varieties to the general public. It currently has more than 90 local varieties of vegetables, legumes and flowers, which are obtained thanks to the work of a network of seed multipliers made up of 20 farmers. Most of the varieties that are multiplied have the organic production seal endorsed by the Balearic Council for Organic Agricultural Production (CBPAE).

It also promotes the production and preservation of cultivated biodiversity and the collective management of agrobiodiversity as part of the village’s heritage.

The establishment is in a municipal space, in the ‘Old Slaughterhouse’ in Porreres, where they sell seeds of local varieties and other products such as books and merchandising, among others, and also do so online. It is also part of the ‘Seed Network: Resowing and Exchanging’, a network of entities with common objectives at the national level.