Simply because no one grows olives on an industrial scale doesn’t mean it automatically can’t be done.
The area around Palmar de Ocoa actually was the site of the first vineyard in the Western Hemisphere. What killed the project was the economic downturn in the second half of the 1500’s and the the effects of Osorio’s Devastation put the nails on the coffin. It wasn’t until a few years ago that a new attempt of creating a vineyard was made there. It doesn’t mean vineyards couldn’t be created there all this time, but simply no one tried to create another post the 1500’s.
Palmar de Ocoa is now a semi-arid place where palm trees away from the coast don’t really grow naturally. Yet, I always wondered why a place with hardly any palms would be called Palmar de Ocoa. The answer to that came indirectly when reading the 2 volume “Notes on Haiti” by the British Ambassador to Haiti Charles McKinzie. This was in the 1820’s after the Haitian Domination had started (hence the DR was part of Haiti despite that’s as far as commonality extended to since even then Spanish was required to talk to most people in the Dominican side.) He basically toured most of the island starting in Port-au-Prince and when he was returning to Haiti via the South, in the chapter where he passed by Palmar de Ocoa he says (paraphrasing) “this place has a large palm grove of a species I haven’t seen anywhere else on the island.” He never specified what species was it or even described how the palms looked. Ding, ding, ding… Palmar de Ocoa hardly has palms… today…. but…