Green peace Centenarian who built an 'allotment in the sky'

When Joan Carulla Figueres turned the roof terrace of his Barcelona apartment into a garden, it was out of nostalgia for his rural origins. Sixty-five years later, the ecological concepts he has long followed have become commonplace, and he is acclaimed as a pioneer of organic farming.

- Stephen Burgen

Carulla, who turned 100 this year, is credited with creating the city's first roof garden. However, his "allotment in the sky" boasts far more than the usual tomato plants and pots of geraniums. It is home to more than 40 fruit trees, vines that produce 100kg of grapes a year, olives, peaches, figs, garlic, aubergines and even potatoes. He is passionate about potatoes.

"The civil war [in Spain in the 1930s] made me a vegetarian, through necessity, then conviction, potato by potato," he said. "For breakfast we ate potatoes, at lunchtime more potatoes with an egg I shared with my father. In the evening, potatoes with vegetables."

Sitting beneath a grapevine on an upturned beer crate - his eyes bright and his hearing and memory astonishingly sharp - he reminisces about the world he grew up in and how he became interested in vegetarianism in the 1950s, when he moved to Barcelona from Juneda, a village with a harsh climate in the Catalan interior.

His approach to agriculture is what today we call organic, but Carulla insists he is not doing anything new and that poor farmers have always practised organic farming out of necessity.