The Wine Route: the winemaking trail of the city of Málaga

There was a time when to say Málaga was to say wine. The wine industry drove the city’s economy and carried the name of its wines across half the world, until in 1878 the phylloxera appeared in a wine press in Moclinejo and changed everything: the province went from some 120,000 hectares of vineyard to the little more than four thousand that remain today. What that insect could not take away was the trace — and it is still there, scattered across the streets, taverns, temples and palaces of the capital.

Today Málaga has recovered and is recognised through its two designations of origin, Málaga y Sierras de Málaga, within a province with plenty to offer in wineries and wine culture — that is covered by the Ruta del Vino de Ronda y Málaga—. But this route never leaves the capital: it is a stroll through what wine left written in the city itself.

It begins in the Viñeros quarter — the Wine Museum and the brotherhood the wine guilds founded in the 17th century —, continues to Plaza de la Constitución to see the building a group of harvesters raised in the 18th century to help one another, drops down to the Alameda to drink in taverns that have poured from the barrel for almost two centuries, calls at the only winery in the municipality open to visitors, and ends up in the hills at the Lagar de Torrijos: the 1843 wine-press house that explains, with its beam press and one-tonne counterweight, how the wine of the Montes was made.

You can do it all in one long day, though the urban stretch is walked in a morning. The Montes call for a car and a wish to look at Málaga from afar.