A municipality in northern La Gomera whose main town, originally called ‘Vallehermoso de nuestro señor San Juan’, took shape after Castilian colonisation. In the mid-19th century it absorbed Chipude, a settlement in the southern uplands of the municipality.
Gomeran wine documented around 1583 (Thomas Nicols); Saint Andrew custom undated; DO 2009The island of abundant wine and the night of encetar on Saint Andrew’s Eve
Around 1583 the Englishman Thomas Nicols, who had lived seven years in the Canaries, wrote that La Gomera, a lordship of the counts, had a sugar mill and “great abundance of wine” and fruit, like Tenerife and Gran Canaria, and that the fleet of the Indies took on fresh supplies in its harbour. From that vineyard descend the stone terraces that climb the ravines of the north, and Vallehermoso is today the municipality with the most vines on the island. According to local custom, the new wine is not tasted until the eve of Saint Andrew, 29 November, when the townspeople go round the bodegas to “encetar”, or broach, the casks of the harvest amid songs and drums, a living tradition whose origin has no known date.
Alive today: Vallehermoso is home to the Regulatory Council of the DO La Gomera and to the Bodega Insular de La Gomera; it has the largest area of vineyard on the island and every November holds a Wine Week dedicated to the forastera gomera grape, with the broaching of the wine around Saint Andrew’s Day.