Greenhouse Harvest Worker

Your day starts early, usually around 6 or 7 in the morning before the heat builds up inside the greenhouse. You will cut, pick and sort tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers or courgettes by hand, using pruning scissors and harvest knives, and load full crates onto trolleys that run down the rows. After picking you help in the packing shed, weighing, grading by size and putting the produce into boxes for the cooperative. The work is on your feet all shift, often bent over or reaching above your head, and the greenhouse stays warm and humid even in winter. Shifts run six days a week, with one rest day, and the pace picks up during the main season from autumn through spring.

Able to work on your feet for a full shift in a warm greenhouse

Careful hands for picking without bruising the fruit

Willingness to start early and work Saturdays in season

Basic Spanish helps but is not required, the crew will show you the ropes

Valid documents to work in Spain

Shared accommodation arranged near the greenhouses, with a low rent taken from your pay

Transport laid on between the housing and the site each morning

Help with the paperwork and your social security registration when you arrive

Protective gloves and gear provided

You start at 1360 net a month and move up to 1580 once you know the crops and can keep the pace through a full season. Pickers who learn to grade and run a packing line are the first ones the employer keeps on year round. Most people reach the top of the band inside their first year.

The site is a stretch of large plastic greenhouses a short drive inland from the Almería coast, the same area you see as a white sea from the air. Inside it is warm and humid, the floors can be muddy after watering, and you work alongside a crew of ten to fifteen pickers. It gets hot by midday in spring, so the early start matters.