Capital of the Terra Alta (Tarragona). After the Christian conquest the castle passed to the Templars as part of the district of Miravet; the town emerged with the Templar settlement charters of 1192 and 1194. It was a scene of the Battle of the Ebro (1938).
Templar lordship from 1153 and settlement charter 1192 (winegrowing role: tradition); Forés bottling late 19th century; cooperative 1919The Templars’ town and its cathedral of wine
The written history of Gandesa begins in 1153, when Ramon Berenguer IV handed the place over to the Order of the Temple as part of the district of Miravet; in 1192 the Templars granted a settlement charter to five cultivators, and Gandesa became the most important town in their domain. In the Terra Alta it is often said that those warrior monks were the ones who planted and tended the first vines, and some bodegas name their wines after them. Centuries later, at the end of the 19th century, the Forés family was already bottling wine in its ancestral home, and in 1919 the growers of the Agricultural Cooperation Syndicate commissioned Cèsar Martinell to build the cooperative bodega, known today as a cathedral of wine.
Alive today: Gandesa is the capital of the DO Terra Alta, whose Regulatory Council is based here, and a benchmark for garnacha blanca. The Cooperative still makes wine in Martinell’s building (1919-1920), declared a BCIN in 2002 and open to visitors. Every November the Festa del Vi de Gandesa, a showcase of the DO, is held. Bàrbara Forés carries on the family tradition.