STARTING a newspaper was never meant to involve police statements or security concerns.
Yet over the past twenty years, The Olive Press has faced legal intimidation, sustained threats over its environmental reporting, and even a violent attack in our own office by two masked men.
None of this was anticipated – but it confirmed why independent journalism, done properly, still matters.
When The Olive Press launched in 2006, Spain was in the midst of a property boom, social media barely existed, and English-language journalism here was both bland and unchallenging. The paper began in my spare bedroom, with plans to spend just a couple of days a week on it while continuing to write for national newspapers back home.
What followed was driven not by ambition, but by necessity.
From the beginning, The Olive Press was built on a simple principle: readers deserved journalism that was independent, curious, and unafraid. That meant reporting seriously on corruption, planning, environmental abuse, and governance – even when it was uncomfortable or unpopular.
Over the years, that approach led to court battles and sustained pressure. We won a landmark legal case against a rogue dentist operating in Spain who had already been struck off in the UK. We also led opposition to a proposed double golf-course macro-project with 2,000 homes in a UNESCO-protected area near Ronda – a campaign later followed by multiple UK and Spanish national newspapers, and one that ultimately helped see the project abandoned.
At the same time, the way people read news has changed dramatically. Over the past few years in particular, our digital audience has grown rapidly. Today, The Olive Press has nearly 3,000 paying subscribers, close to 75,000 registered users, around 7 million monthly views on Facebook, and around 20,000 daily visitors to our website.
From those early days in a spare bedroom, The Olive Press now operates from its own newsroom in Marbella, with a team of around a dozen journalists and staff. We also have journalists scattered around the country.
As we mark our 20th anniversary, we are also entering a new phase. The Olive Press is becoming a national monthly newspaper, with improved print quality and a broader editorial scope.
As planning pressure, environmental risk, and political opacity intensify across Spain, the need for patient, independent reporting has never been greater.
In this next phase, The Olive Press will be committing more time and space to investigations that demand persistence rather than speed – planning, environment, governance, justice – the stories that shape lives long after headlines fade.
If you value journalism that resists pressure, takes its time, and puts the public interest first, we invite you to support us and hold us to account as we enter this next chapter.
Twenty years on, The Olive Press remains proudly independent – and more committed than ever to telling the stories that matter.
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