Camarena
Toledo · Castilla–La Mancha
DO Méntrida4.848inhabitants
1272first mention
1576wine documented
A municipality in the Torrijos comarca (Toledo), within the DO Méntrida. Resettled after the conquest of Toledo, it was linked to the archbishopric of Toledo; its name has been related to a pre-Roman personal name or to the archbishop's ‘Cámara’ (chamber).
First mention: 24 November 1272: a letter of Alfonso X “given at Camarena”, addressed to the monastery of Santo Domingo el Real in Madrid. Wikipedia also mentions a resettlement in 1142 under Alfonso VII and another in 697 (Egica), without documentary source.
The legend
1576 (Relación Topográfica of Camarena); caves mentioned in the early 17th century; Madoz 1846; DO Méntrida 1976Camarena, where the largest harvest was wine
On 7 January 1576 the residents of Camarena answered the questionnaire that Philip II sent to the towns of Castile. They described a village of Toledo set between two valleys and two slopes, with a harvest of cereals, “larger that of wine” and a small one of oil, and a municipal territory with “a great quantity of vines, olives, almond trees”. That reply, preserved at El Escorial, is the clearest portrait of wine in the Méntrida district in the 16th century. Beneath the town opens a network of excavated galleries and caves where wine was made and stored; nobody knows when they were dug, though there are documents that mention them in the early 17th century, and local memory recalls the fame of its “Aragonese” red. In 1846 Madoz still counted wine among the town’s products.
Alive today: Camarena is today one of the towns with the most bodegas in the DO Méntrida: the Regulatory Council lists four in the municipality (Viñedos de Camarena, Bodegas y Viñedos González, Canopy-Consul and Uva de Vida), wine remains its main economic driver, and its cave-cellars form part of the Méntrida-Toledo Wine Route.
Wineries and their wines
- Viña Bispo Blanco
- Viña Bispo Rosado
- Viña Bispo Tinto
- Viña Bispo Tinto Crianza
- Castillo de Belarfonso
- Congo
- Ganadero
- Kaos
- La Viña Escondida
- Loco
- Malpaso
- Tres Patas
- Biográfico Ancestral Rosado
- Biográfico Tinto
- Latitud 40
- Luna
- Madre
- Septenio
- Sol del 19
- Verbena
Wine towns nearby