Capital of the Bages district (Barcelona), on the banks of the Cardener and the centre of the DO Pla de Bages. Its name appears in a decree of the Frankish king Odo in 889; it has been linked to Ptolemy's Bacasis or to a Roman “Minorisa”, without firm evidence.
Bacchus legend (undated); mas documented 13th century; aguardiente from the early 18th century; four cellars in the late 18th centuryThe land of Bacchus and the thousand-year-old mas of the Oller family
In the Bages it is often said that the district’s name comes from Bacchus, the god of wine, and the DO itself tells it that way, though it is a folk etymology. What is documented is more modest and more solid: the mas Oller, in the municipality of Manresa, has its roots in the resettlement of the 10th century and appears in the 13th as casa Ollera. Its owners lived off wine for centuries; from the early 18th century they were the first family in Manresa to distil aguardiente for export, and by the end of that century the farmhouse had four cellars and 23 casks. Phylloxera devastated the vineyards of the Bages between 1889 and 1896, and the Oller did not bottle on a commercial scale again until 2003.
Alive today: Manresa is home to the Regulatory Council of the DO Pla de Bages (since 1995), housed since 2001 in the Casa de la Culla, a medieval farmhouse that made wine until the 19th century. Still active within the municipality are Oller del Mas, which grows picapoll, mandó and sumoll, and Collbaix-Celler El Molí. Every autumn the Festa de la Verema del Bages travels around the towns of the district.