Careers
Instruments tell you a number. Someone walking a parcel tells you why. We hire people who can do both — and we would rather train the right person than settle for a CV that matches on paper.
Working here
Most of our work happens outdoors, in a district where July regularly sits above 38 °C and January mornings are cold enough to see your breath. Days are long during harvest and quieter in late winter. Nobody at Lavourra pretends otherwise, and we plan the year around it rather than around a spreadsheet.
Teams are small — an estate typically runs with four to seven permanent staff — so the person who spots a blocked emitter is usually the person who fixes it. That means real responsibility early, and it means we take on people who prefer to be trusted rather than supervised.
Our head office in Évora is twenty minutes from the nearest grove, and the agronomy team is expected to be in the field, not in front of it on a screen. If you like the idea of a job where the results of your decisions are visible three months later, standing in a row, this is that kind of work.
Why join us
No table football, no fruit basket — we grow the fruit. These are the things our people actually said mattered when we asked them.
01
Salaries benchmarked above the Alentejo agricultural sector agreement, reviewed each January. Harvest supervisors and machinery operators earn a completion bonus at the end of the season.
02
Roughly seven in ten of our seasonal crew return the following year, and we hold their place. Several of our permanent supervisors started on a three-month harvest contract.
03
Machinery certification, pesticide application licences, first aid and irrigation technical courses are paid for and scheduled in the quiet months, not promised and forgotten.
04
Crew transport runs from Évora, Beja and Reguengos to whichever estate is working that day. Lunch is cooked on site through harvest — it is a long day otherwise.
05
We keep rooms in Beja and Ferreira do Alentejo for crew coming from outside the district. For non-EU crew we sponsor the Portuguese seasonal work permit and file the paperwork with SEF/AIMA ourselves.
06
Between January and April the estates run a shorter week. We front-load the year deliberately so people can take proper time off once the olives are in.
Open roles
Every one of these is seasonal work tied to the olive harvest, the cereal cut or the irrigated produce run. Six of the eight are open to non-EU applicants — we sponsor the Portuguese seasonal work permit and handle the paperwork. Filter by department or employment type; each role links to the full detail and an email application.
8 roles shown · 27 places
Field Operations
Bring in the Galega and Cobrançosa crop on the Beja estates between October and December, working the rows behind the shakers and hand-picking the old trees the machines cannot reach.
Right to work: Open to non-EU nationals — we sponsor the seasonal work permit
Field Operations
Drive the trunk shakers and straddle harvesters through the Évora groves for the ten weeks of the olive campaign, and keep fruit damage and ground losses down while you do it.
Right to work: Open to non-EU nationals — we sponsor the seasonal work permit
Field Operations
Cut the wheat, barley and oats across the Beja dryland blocks in the six-week window between the grain drying down and the summer heat taking it, running the combine from mid-morning to nightfall.
Right to work: Open to non-EU nationals — we sponsor the seasonal work permit
Field Operations
Work the irrigated blocks through the long produce season — planting out in April, picking tomatoes, melons, peppers and brassicas through summer, and clearing the last rows in November.
Right to work: Open to non-EU nationals — we sponsor the seasonal work permit
Water & Infrastructure
Keep the drip network running for the eight months the water is on, from the Alqueva offtake to the last emitter in the row, across every irrigated block we farm.
Right to work: Open to non-EU nationals — we sponsor the seasonal work permit
Packhouse & Logistics
Grade, weigh and palletise everything that comes off the fields at the Évora packhouse, and get it onto the right truck with the right lot number on it.
Right to work: Open to non-EU nationals — we sponsor the seasonal work permit
Field Operations
Run the crews and the daily sequence through both harvests at Beja — from the first cereal cut in June to the last olive load in December — with up to forty people on the ground at peak.
Right to work: EU/EEA right to work required
Quality & Compliance
Cover the quality desk through the busiest half of the year, holding the record trail that lets a buyer in Rotterdam ask which parcel a pallet came from and get an answer the same day.
Right to work: EU/EEA right to work required
Every application gets an answer within ten working days, including the ones we turn down.
Interviews happen where the work happens. Bring boots. For field roles you will walk a parcel with the person who would be your manager.
For technical and machinery roles we ask for a paid half-day on site. It is fairer to both sides than another hour of questions.
Pay, hours, transport, season length and training are all written down before you sign anything.
Trade enquiries
Send us the crop, the volume and the delivery window. If we can grow it well here we will say so, and if we cannot we will tell you that too — usually within two working days.
