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The fungus is just starting How a Spanish province became the world’s truffle leader Teruel has replaced France’s Périgord atop the tuber charts AS A CHILD, Manolo Doñate often saw strange men with dogs in the mountains near his house in Sarrión, a town in the Teruel province of Aragón. They were hunting the abundant wild truffles. In the 1980s, while visiting a plantation in France, he decided to become the first in Teruel to cultivate truffle-producing oak trees. “People thought he was crazy,” says Simona, his daughter. Little was known about how to farm the fungus; it takes around ten years for the trees to produce. But it worked. Today Teruel is the world’s biggest producer of Tuber melanosporum, the prince of black truffles. Last year the region exported more than 26,000kg of them. Production from France’s Périgord region, previously the biggest producer, has plummeted over the past century, as farmers switched to easier crops. (Truffle farmers must introduce the
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