A town in northern Tenerife that takes its name from the Guanche menceyato of the same name. After the conquest (1496) it grew around the hermitage of Santa Catalina (1505), with the Portuguese Sebastián Machado as founder; it had a royal mayor from 1540 and became a municipality in 1812.
vineyards in Acentejo since the early 16th century; La Borralla vineyard documented 1618; order to uproot vines 1641The La Borralla vineyard and the Mayorazgo de Tenerife (1618)
For centuries Tacoronte was wheat country: many estates carried old ground rents that obliged them to sow cereals. Even so, the vine made its way. In 1618 the alderman Andrés Lorenzo and his wife, María de Moxica Arias y Saavedra, lords of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, founded the “Mayorazgo de Tenerife”, an entailed estate whose assets included a plot of Vidueño vines in Tacoronte, at the place called La Borralla. The estate, with its well, wine press and cellar, later passed to the Benítez de Lugo family. Vineyards spread so widely in the district that in 1641 the Crown ordered the vines planted above the royal road to La Orotava to be uprooted in order to save the cereal land. Three and a half centuries later, Tacoronte-Acentejo became the first wine DO in the Canary Islands.
Alive today: Tacoronte gives its name to the DO Tacoronte-Acentejo, the first in the Canary Islands (1992), and is home to Bodegas Insulares de Tenerife, born in 1992 from a project of the Cabildo, which brings together hundreds of growers from the district. The university route of wine estates visits its old properties with their wine presses, and the municipality's bodegas open their new wine every autumn.