Ribeira Sacra: Eternal Wines of the Sacred Riverbank
Ribeira Sacra. “The Sacred Riverbank.”
You have to admit, it’s a name that instantly conjures up the two most important aspects of this region: rivers and monasteries. And we can’t begin to understand this landscape without the monasteries, perched on towering cliffs far away from the prying eyes and influences of the material world.
No one knows for sure when people first started making wine here, but the first vineyards are probably linked to the Romans. We know that once their wartime service was over, Roman legionnaires received land as payment for their services—this is how some of the first villages of Galicia were founded, as the Roman soldiers moved in with their families and servants. Being wine-loving Romans, they probably started cultivating wild grapevines they found, and the rest is history.
Later, 8th- and 9th-century communities of monks looking for solitude came to the banks of the Miño and Sil. They built monasteries and dedicated the best areas to vineyards. Thanks to the work of these medieval monks, the river canyons were gradually transformed into thriving centers of agriculture. The settlements clinging to the edges of the Sil and Miño canyons grew vines and fruit trees, and at the top of the slopes trees provided firewood, stakes for the vines, and the all-important chestnut—the main starch in the pre-potato Galician diet.
We don’t know much more about medieval winemaking in the Ribeira Sacra, but it’s possible that the monasteries in the Sil and Miño canyons supplied wine to other church centers to the north, near the city of Lugo. Along with wine from Ribeiro, a thriving medieval wine trade connected all of Galicia.
Over the next few centuries, the wine economy in Ribeira Sacra was pretty small and insular. Each wine-growing zone usually supplied a group of villages and farms that surrounded them, often in the higher areas above the canyon walls. Monasteries paid local growers a small sum for the grapes they eked out from the terraced vineyards, while farming families who lived above the canyon’s slopes subsisted on cattle, pig, or wheat farming and traded with their neighbors on the slopes for their wine. Some towns exported wine that traveled beyond the Sil and Miño to regional capitals—Sober, Amandi, and Chantada stand out for making famous wines.
"Monasterio de Santa Cristina de Ribas de Sil" by José Antonio Gil Martínez is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The 19th Century
The 19th century began shaping situations in the Ribeira Sacra that continue to this day. The vine diseases that devastated Europe would find their way into the Sil and Miño, and the arrival of the railroad was about to completely change Galicia’s winemaking economy.
A key to understanding Galician wine history is the minifundio, or smallholding. This is a Galician cultural staple: small plots of land, sometimes the size of a vegetable garden, that traditionally functioned as orchard, garden, chicken run, cow pasture, wheat field, and vineyard in rural Galician families. The region’s inheritance laws divided up property equally between the surviving heirs, so a piece of land that started out small got even smaller with each passing generation. For vineyards, the minifundio dynamic meant that most growers couldn’t make wine commercially—instead, they sold their wine or kept it for their own consumption.
When vines had to be replanted after phylloxera, most growers replaced old vines of mouratón and brancellao with new varieties like mencía and garnacha tintorera. These grapes came from nurseries further east in Valdeorras and Castilla-León and promised resistance to mildew and higher yields. For nearly a century, these two grapes would form the backbone of wines made in the Ribeira Sacra, and continue to shape the regions’ wines today.
The arrival of the railroad in the late 1800s hastened the decline of whatever commercially viable winemaking left over from the medieval period. Growers who spent their days in backbreaking labor on small, steeply-sloped plots couldn’t compete with wine that came in from flat, fertile Castilla. At the time, no one in their right mind would pay more money for the wine coming out of the Sil or Miño canyons. Faced with these hard realities, huge numbers of people left the countryside and abandoned their vines.
History, Washed Away
Galicia supplies about a tenth of Spain’s electricity, mostly via wind power and hydroelectric dams built during the Franco dictatorship. Under the Generalísimo‘s watchful eye, millions of tons of concrete flowed into the Miño and Sil to build the Os Peares (1955), Belesar (1963), Santo Estevo (1957) and San Pedro (1959) dams.
Their construction had an incalculable impact on the surroundings: not only did it flood the riverbanks and drown entire towns, cemeteries, roads and vineyards, it changed the flow of the rivers to the point of destroying many of the natural resources that were there before. Today, the reservoirs produce megawatts for Naturgy and Iberdrola, two of Spain’s largest electric companies.
The Belesar Dam under construction
Among the many losses was the small town of Portomarín, whose important medieval history led to it being declared a historical and artistic complex. More than two thousand hectares of land with vineyards, historic churches, and entire towns were washed away in the name of business.
The dams’ unpleasant legacy lives on to this day: in 2021 the Ribeira Sacra’s candidacy to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site was delayed, partly because of the hydroelectric dams. For UNESCO, the giant concrete semicircles cause a “visual impact” on the landscape that needs further justification.
An Area In Decline?
The place we know today as the Ribeira Sacra spans the Miño and Sil, taking advantage of a shared tradition of monasteries and winemaking. But historically, these weren’t enough to create a shared sense of identity.
The mountains to the south and the lack of good roads to larger cities in the north or east created pockets of isolation not only between the different canyons of the Sil and Miño, but also between towns along the same side of the river. For most of the 20th century, the Ribeira Sacra was cut off and cast aside from developments in the rest of Galicia, and the gradual abandonment of the countryside continued at a quicker and quicker pace.
The situation wasn’t any better when another viticultural survey was published in 1983. Over 85% of plots in the Ribeira Sacra were less than a tenth of a hectare and there was hardly any wine made in meaningful quantities. Small family wineries made as much wine as they could, without no regard to quality-enhancing measures like reduced yields or cleanliness in the winery. Even for the wineries that were trying to make a go of serious winemaking, there was hardly a market to speak of. Something needed to change soon, or else winemaking would die out for good.
The Beginnings of a Wine Region
With Franco’s death in 1975, a sea of opportunities opened up for Spain. There was a new constitution, autonomous communities were formed, and renewed government interest and money began to pour into the countryside.
Despite this influx of interest and capital, the problems of population drain continued. In the early 1980’s, the town of Amandi decided to try to attract people to the area by bringing back the traditional farmers’ fair celebrated around Easter week, usually on Palm Sunday. Since agriculture was in decline, they decided to add to the potential list of participants by inviting local grape growers to show off their finished wine. This was no fancy wine tasting; it was more in line with the Galician “exaltation” of a specific food—in other words, an all-you-can-eat pigout on the town council’s dime.
The first fair had in attendance one cow and thirteen 32-liter barrels of wine for tasting. It’s probably a testament to the wine’s success that no one remembers what happened to the cow.
Building on this success, the next year’s edition focused solely on wine, and upped the quantity to 3,000 bottles that were bought from the growers and sold from the windows of the town hall for 125 pesetas each. The idea of bringing back the Palm Sunday fairs quickly caught on, and within a few years there were wine fairs in Chantada, Quiroga, and Pantón too.
Poster for the first Chantada Wine Fair, left — Poster for the 42nd Amandi Wine Fair, right
Flipping through an old guide to Galicia, one of the naming committee struck gold: he came across the name “Rivoyra Sacrata.” It was quickly decided to change the name to the more Galician-sounding “Ribeira Sacra,” and the name has stuck around ever since.
In 1975 the Ministry of Agriculture published a report on the viticultural situation of Spain called “El Viñedo Español.” Where the vineyards of the Sil and Miño were concerned, the Ministry didn’t mince words: it rang a death knell for viticulture in the region.
The official opinion was that grape-growing couldn’t turn a profit. The trend was “frank regression” and about 30% of the vineyards were “semi-abandoned or carelessly cultivated.”
With proof their wine could sell locally, the growers began to believe in a project that was being talked about around the province of Lugo, organized by an Agricultural Extension worker named José Mouriño.
Galicia’s Agricultural Extension program aimed to help rural farmers get the tools they needed to succeed in an increasingly competitive world, mostly through talks that passed on developments in science and technology. It was precisely these kinds of talks that led to the creation of a wine region. José Mouriño first came to this far-flung part of southern Lugo in 1973 and immediately fell in love. With the flood of government money in the 1980s, Mouriño worked with other growers and the few people who called themselves winemakers at the time to convince growers to help get a wine region off the ground.
All they needed was a name.
Creating the Ribeira Sacra
When it came time to name the new wine region, everyone had an opinion. Growers in Amandi said their wine was the most famous, so the region should be called Amandi. The only problem was that people in Chantada said the same thing. Different neutral names were proposed: “Sur de Lugo,” “Ribeiras do Miño y Sil,” and simply “Miño,” but none felt right.
Then, fate intervened. Flipping through an old guide to Galicia, one of the naming committee struck gold: he came across the name “Rivoyra Sacrata.”
The story goes that in 1124, Teresa of Portugal donated some land near modern-day Castro Caldelas to the monastery of Montederramo. In the letter of donation, she made special mention of the place called Rivoyra Sacrata. This name was repeated over the years in some history books as “Sacred Riverbank,” since people interpreted it as being linked to all the monasteries on the banks of the Sil and Miño.
There’s only one issue with this story: it isn’t true.
In 1987, eminent Galician philologist Manuel Vidán Torreira argued that the word rivoyra was an erroneous transcription of revoyra, a name that doesn’t allude to a sacred riverbank at all, but rather to a sacred oak. (Revoyra = reboiro, a kind of oak in Galician.) The revoyra sacrata was simply the name for a nearby oak grove, probably known as the “Sacred Grove” because of its importance to the ancient animistic Castro culture.
Despite Torreira’s thorough explanation, no one paid him any attention whatsoever.It was quickly decided to change the name to the more Galician-sounding “Ribeira Sacra,” and the name has stuck around ever since.
In 1993, the designation of Viño da Terra Ribeira Sacra was approved, and in 1996 it became a full-fledged Denominación de Origen. From there, growth was slow but constant.
One advantage for the new wine appellation was the Galician government’s investment in rural tourism. Aiming to cater to an urban population that demanded alternate forms of tourism, one of their solutions was to send people to the countryside. They needed to unify an area that had been sliced and diced into different segments for years, and that was severely lacking in infrastructure. The new Ribeira Sacra wine region laid out a convenient boundary for a touristic region, and thus began a symbiotic relationship where the Galician government spent most of the 1990s investing in infrastructure, rehabilitating churches and monasteries, and generally preparing the Ribeira Sacra to receive tourists—especially the wine-drinking kind.
"Cañón do Sil" by amaianos is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Ribeira Sacra Today
Denominación de Origen Ribeira Sacra is one of the greatest inventions of the last half century. It isn’t a comarca, like Ribeiro or Monterrei. It’s not a historically agreed-upon area. It isn’t even in one province.
But the inventors of the Ribeira Sacra banded together around shared geography, winemaking tradition, and love for their land to create the wine appellation that exists today.
26 years later, Ribeira Sacra has 1,321 hectares of vines, 2,212 growers, and 91 wineries. Production is still comparatively tiny, but has grown from 2.2 million kilos of grapes and 1.47 million liters in 1996 to 6.5 million kilos and 4.3 million liters of wine in 2022.
One reason for the region’s growth has come from producers committing to the recovery of native grape varieties. Little-known grapes like brancellao, merenzao, or dona branca have slowly but surely made their way into the appellation. Mencía remains the powerhouse, but native varieties have grown from a few thousand kilos of brancellao, merenzao, and sousón in the early 2000s to tens and hundreds of thousands of kilos as of 2021.
The march toward creating complex, age-worthy wines is helmed by pioneers like Adega Algueira and Bodega Guímaro, both of whom worked with superstar winemaker Raúl Pérez to up their winemaking game. Pérez still makes wine with Rodri Méndez of Forjas del Salnés from parcels on the banks of the Miño sub-zone. Outside of the DO, other winemakers like Pablo Soldavini, Xabi Seoane, or the Envínate team have also bet on the region for making high-toned expressions of terroir.
In the years since the pandemic, Ribeira Sacra is facing huge challenges. The region produced more than its usual amount of wine during the pandemic, but a global decline in red wine sales has led to a surplus that has brought the disparities in production models to light. There’s a huge difference in volume between the biggest and smallest wineries, with some that barely reach 2,000 liters of wine a year and others that produce more than 1.5 million liters. Nine wineries account for 56% of the production, with the largest, Bodegas Rectoral de Amandi (Bodegas Gallegas), producing 34% of total Ribeira Sacra wine. Most of this wine stays within Spain, with the vast majority consumed in Galicia as affordable wines for everyday drinking. But the surplus led these large wineries to cancel contracts with growers, many of whom now have no way to make money.
Galicia’s history has been full of young people emigrating from the interior to the coast, and there’s a serious lack of generational continuity to take over for aging growers. With this in mind, the region cut yields in 2025, and is considering a zonification project similar to the ones that were successful in Bierzo and Priorat. The coming years will determine whether Ribeira Sacra can transform its challenges into opportunities, balancing tradition with innovation to secure a sustainable future for its growers and wines.