La Orotava
Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Canary Islands
VC Islas CanariasDO Valle de la Orotava42.514inhabitants
1500first mention
1550wine documented
A town in northern Tenerife, in the valley that was the heart of the Guanche menceyato of Taoro, the last great centre of resistance during the conquest. It depended on La Laguna until Philip IV granted it the title of independent town (villa exenta) in 1648.
First mention: The forms of the name (above all ‘Araotava’, in some 65% of cases, derived from the Guanche Arautava) appear in the Datas de Tenerife, the land allotments made after the conquest, from 17 April 1500 (E. Serra Ràfols, Las Datas de Tenerife, 1978).
The legend
first vineyards in the first half of the 16th century (Franchi, Montijos); cordón trenzado since the 18th centuryThe vines of the Genoese Franchi and the cordón trenzado
After the conquest of Tenerife in 1496, the allotments of land and water in the Taoro valley included sugar cane, but also vines. When sugar declined in the mid-16th century, wine took over as the great export product. In La Orotava, the Genoese merchant Antonio Franchi Lutzardo was among the first to plant vines on his estate of Los Montijos, and his lineage gave its name to a wine-growing entailed estate. Centuries later, when the English market for Malvasía was lost in the 18th century, the valley's growers devised the cordón trenzado (braided cordon): vine shoots intertwined in long trailing rows on forked props, which after the harvest were gathered up so that potatoes could be sown in the same soil.
Alive today: La Orotava is home to the Regulatory Council of the DO Valle de la Orotava, created in 1995, which protects the cordón trenzado as a unique training system. The town council has signposted six wine itineraries among century-old vines, guachinches and bodegas such as Arautava, Valleoro and Suertes del Marqués.
Wineries and their wines
- Arautava Listán Negro
- Arautava Tinto Dulce
- Canary Sack Listán Blanco Dulce
- Finca La Habanera Albillo Criollo
- Finca La Habanera Listán Blanco
- Finca La Habanera Listán Negro
- La Quinta Roja Listán Negro
- Los Topes Listán Blanco
- Gran Tehyda Blanco Dulce
- Gran Tehyda Blanco Lías
- Gran Tehyda Tinto
- Gran Tehyda Tinto Vintage
- Valleoro Brut
- Valleoro Tinto
- Viña Taoro Rosado
- Viña Taoro Tinto
- 7 Fuentes
- Candio
- Cruz Santa
- El Lance
- La Solana
- Los Pasitos
- Trenzado
- Vidonia
Wine towns nearby