Watermelon
Harvested in spring under cover, Almería's watermelon gets ahead of the European midsummer. Black seedless, mini or striped, it ripens close to the sandy soil before a still largely manual harvest.
In Almería, watermelon is first and foremost a spring fruit grown under cover. The Junta's Observatory counts 8,842 protected hectares and about 510,000 tonnes for the 2024/2025 season: the province's second protected crop by area and fourth by volume and value. The sector also claims it as Europe's first watermelon of each year.
Greenhouses bring the harvest forward to between April and July. The fruit rests on the sand of the enarenado, among creeping stems and broad leaves, and ripeness is checked before the peduncle is cut. The main commercial types are the black seedless, the mini and the striped with or without seeds; the yellow-fleshed watermelon remains a minority.
Its market reaches far beyond the local one: in 2024/2025 exports equalled 41% of the volume produced at origin, 88% of it bound for the European Union — Germany alone took 41% of the exported volume. In northern markets, early summer still tastes of Almería watermelon.
Varieties
- Black seedless
- Mini
- Striped with seeds
- Striped seedless
- Yellow-fleshed (minority)
Season
Springtime at ground level
Watermelon is a spring crop: for a few weeks, whole stretches of the huerta are given over to it, mostly under plastic but in the open air too. Inside the greenhouses, the sandy enarenado disappears under a blanket of leaves with round fruit showing through; on the open plots, the same crop sprawls at ground level until the edge of summer.
Opening the European season
Growing under cover brings the cycle forward and puts the fruit on the market ahead of everyone else — the sector sums it up in the motto of Europe's first watermelon. Like the rest of the protected huerta, the crop is grown on sanded soil with drip irrigation.
