A municipality in the Priorat at the foot of the Montsant range; it includes the village of Escaladei, beside the first Carthusian monastery on the peninsula. In 1170 Albert de Castellvell ceded the site to Arnau de Salforès to settle it; it later passed to the domains of Bonrepòs and of the charterhouse.
12th centuryThe ladder of the angels: Escaladei and the birth of the Priorat
Tradition has it that King Alfons the Chaste sent two knights to find a place for the Carthusians who had come from Provence. At the foot of the Montsant they met a shepherd who told them of a wonder: from the top of a pine where his sheep grazed rose a ladder up which angels climbed to heaven. The king saw it as a sign, and there in 1194 Santa Maria d'Escaladei, ‘ladder of God’, the first charterhouse on the peninsula, was founded. The monks planted vines and made wine, and their lordship, the ‘priorate’ of Escaladei, ended up giving its name to the whole Priorat comarca and its wine.
Alive today: Escaladei is a village of La Morera de Montsant within the DOQ Priorat, whose Consell Regulador regards the charterhouse as the ‘cradle’ of its wine. The monument, partly restored since 1998, is open to visitors. After the disentailment of 1835, five families founded in 1844 the company that gave rise to Cellers de Scala Dei, which took the first bottled Priorat to Paris in 1878.