Mid congress technical visit.

Nov 21

Cost: 50 € per delegate. The cost of the visit includes bus transportation and lunch.

This one day tour will be organized to allow delegates that can’t attend pre or post conference tours to have an insight of the Spanish citrus industry.
Buses will depart at 08:00hrs from the “Valencia Conference Centre”.

For logistic reasons this tour will be for a maximum of 400 delegates. Bookings for this tour will be based on the payment date.

The tour was planned to include visits to a large packinghouse (Fontestad), a citrus orchard (Rincón de Gausa) and the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias (IVIA) facilities, all of them located in the Northern area of Valencia (about 80 Km round trip). Three independent groups will be organized to perform the visits successively.

The Fontestad Packinghouse, a familiar enterprise with modern facilities that commercialized about 100.000 tons of fresh fruit per year was located at Museros, about 2 Km from the IVIA. Unfortunately, on May 10th the packinghouse was totally destroyed by a fire and now we are looking for an alternative visit for the tour. Therefore, we had to look for an alternative, and we have decided to visit the very nice collection of commercial mandarin and sweet orange varieties at the experimental facilities “Masia del Doctor”, belonging to ANECOOP and located at Museros, about 2 km from IVIA.

The orchard “Rincón de Gausa”, located in Sagunto, a 160 ha of drip-irrigated citrus groves, mostly in a hill side, part of them organized in traditional terraces and the others in ridges following level lines. They grow Fukumoto, Lane late, and Valencia sweet oranges and Clemenrubí, Orogrande, Esbal, Mioro and Murcott mandarins, most grafted on Carrizo citrange.

The well known research centre IVIA is located in Moncada, about 24 km away from Valencia. There will be a poster exposition of the citrus research lines carried out at the Institute and we will visit the protected collection of the Germplasm Bank of pathogen-free plants (that are the origin of all nursery plants produced in Spain) and the field collection of the Germplasm Bank.
You will also enjoy lunch tasting a typical “paella”.