A municipality in the North-West district of Murcia, with Roman villas such as Los Cantos (the Venus of Bullas) and an Andalusi settlement defended by a castle. After the conquest it depended on Mula, Caravaca and Cehegín, and in 1689 Charles II granted it the title of villa (town).
Roman seal 1st century AD; traditional cellars 18th-19th century; documented in a municipal record of 1849The Castellar seal and the 221 cellars beneath the houses of Bullas
In Bullas they say that almost every house in the old town hides a cellar, and it is no exaggeration: an inventory in 2000 counted 221 traditional cellars, with their buried clay tinajas, built mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries. To explain where it all comes from, the Wine Museum displays a 1st-century Roman piece, the Castellar seal, with an allegorical grape-harvest motif. The first detailed written description comes in 1849, when the Town Council answered a questionnaire from the Royal Commissioner for Agriculture: the grapes were trodden in jaraíces (treading floors), the must fermented in half-buried tinajas until February and was covered with oil, and almost all the wine was sold in Lorca and Totana. Among the grapes mentioned already appears the ‘moxastel valenciana’, ancestor of Monastrell.
Alive today: Bullas gives its name to the DOP Bullas, whose Consejo Regulador is based in a former municipal cellar on Calle Balsa, and its Wine Museum occupies the great cellar of the Melgares de Aguilar family. At the end of September the Wine Festival, combined with the festivities of the Virgen del Rosario, turns on the Wine Fountain and celebrates the treading of the grapes and the blessing of the first must.