Asturias

How apples came

Asturias grew its own cider apples. For centuries, the protected designation’s rules explain, farmers raised trees from seed, kept the most productive and best-adapted, and grafted from them, which is why the region has so many local varieties and why its orchards always mix them¹. Some authors hold that cider was drunk before the Romans came, but the first firm records of apple growing and cider making date from the early Middle Ages². In the east, the monasteries of San Bartolomé at Nava, Valdediós near Villaviciosa, Villamayor in Piloña and Soto de Dueñas in Parres promoted orchards and cider, and by the twelfth century the lagares were, with the flour mills, the region’s largest industry². Medieval charters speak of pumares, pomares and sicera, and from the eleventh to the fourteenth century custom let one man plant apple trees on another’s land under contract¹.

The Catastro de Ensenada, the great survey made in Asturias between 1751 and 1754, shows cider still confined to the north-eastern quarter, with wine made in the west. Ana Buergo Fernández has estimated from its answers about 241 ha of apples in the cider-making councils, 650,000 to 900,000 litres of cider every two years, since harvests were declared biennial, and 173 lagares; only Villaviciosa had land planted with apple trees in due order, “which they call pumaradas” (translated)².

In the nineteenth century rising prices and the first exports led farmers to plant apple trees along the edges of their fields and then whole orchards³. Emigration to the Americas opened a market, and in 1857 Tomás Zarracina began making sparkling “champagne” cider in Gijón by carbonating the traditional drink; by the end of the century Asturias made 25,313,860 litres of cider a year on Félix Aramburu’s figures¹. From 1956 to 1982 the Estación Pomológica at Villaviciosa studied varieties, rootstocks and methods; it grew into today’s regional agrifood research service, the SERIDA³. The protected designation’s regulation, ratified in 2003, admitted 22 varieties⁴; in 2018 the European Commission approved 54 more from the SERIDA’s breeding programme⁵.

How they’re grown

Asturias is a corridor 15 to 80 km wide and 200 km long between the Cantabrian Sea and the Cantabrian mountains; more than half of it lies above 400 m, and the rain, 900 mm a year on parts of the coast, passes 2,000 mm in the eastern mountains¹. The orchards are scattered through small valleys and slopes in all 78 concejos¹.

The traditional pomarada is extensive, apples and grass together, with 100 to 150 trees to the hectare: large trees that reach full bearing at 12 to 14 years, live 35 to 45 and give about 20 tonnes a hectare³. They stand on seedling rootstocks and grow free; other orchards are trained as spindles on dwarfing or semi-dwarfing rootstocks, and the rules allow 100 to 1,000 trees a hectare, with the grass between rows mown, cleared or grazed¹. The regulation of 2003 forbade irrigation, save in drought with the council’s leave, and capped yields at 35 tonnes a hectare⁴. Around 2014 Asturias had about 5,832 ha of apples, almost all cider varieties, 86% of them traditional orchards³.

Alternate bearing, a big crop followed by a small one, still shapes the llagares’ supply^5,7, and the SERIDA’s new varieties were bred partly to lighten it⁵. The SERIDA also keeps an apple germplasm bank at Villaviciosa with more than 800 entries from Asturias, Spain, the rest of Europe and other continents⁶. In 2025 the summer drought cut the crop in a year that alternate bearing should have favoured⁷.

What’s picked

Asturias harvested 21,829 tonnes of apples in 2024, against 36,214 in 2023, 13,086 in 2022 and 31,858 in 2021⁸. The protected designation is growing: its registered growers rose from 358 in 2020 to 382 in 2024, with 979 ha, and in 2024 its 31 llagares made 3,338,804 litres of cider from 4,669,704 kg of apples; in 2023 they had made 5,198,309 litres⁹. The designation issued 4,626,600 bottle labels in 2024, 6% more than in 2023¹⁰.

The SERIDA’s ripening data show the span: Martina ripens in the last third of September, Blanquina in the last third of October, Raxao in the first half of November and Regona in the last third of November, while Durón d’Arroes waits until mid-December¹¹. In 2025 apples reached the llagares from September, and pressing was expected to run to the end of November or into December⁷.

The 76 permitted varieties fall into nine groups by acidity and phenolic content. Acid and semi-acid apples predominate, bitter and bittersweet ones bring tannin, and sweet ones round off the blend¹; table apples are not allowed¹¹. Regona, Raxao, Blanquina, De la Riega, Xuanina, Durona de Tresali, Perico and Solarina were among the original 22⁴.

On the table

Natural cider, the protected kind, must reach 5% alcohol, may not be sweetened, watered, pasteurised or carbonated, and owes its faint prickle to its own gas¹. In 2024, 82% of it was sold through bars and restaurants¹⁰.

It is poured from a height. The pourer holds the bottle high above the head and the tilted glass below the waist so that the stream strikes the glass’s rim, waking the gas; the measure, the culete, should be at least 100 ml and is drunk at once, and a bottle gives six¹². Pouring is learnt by imitation¹³; contests of pourers date from the early 1950s, and the Asturian championship usually runs to more than twenty contests between spring and autumn³. The glass was once shared, the first cider glasses coming from the La Industria works in Gijón from the 1870s³; today each drinker has one¹².

Cider is drunk in cider houses and chigres, at pilgrimages and at the espicha, the party when a barrel is broached^13,3. Villaviciosa’s Festival de la Manzana began in 1960, timed to the town’s feast of the Virgen del Portal, when the first apples of the season are picked; Nava’s cider festival began on 22 June 1969, added a national pourers’ contest in 1970 and became annual in 1988³. Asturias declared its cider culture an Asset of Cultural Interest in 2014¹⁵, and in 2024 UNESCO added it to its Representative List of intangible heritage¹³.

Notes

• In 2005 Spain had about 7,780 ha of cider apples, some 6,200 of them in Asturias³.
• Asturias counted 709 natural-cider works at the end of the 1950s, about 400 industrial and 1,500 family lagares in 1972, and 96 registered in 2005³.
• Asturian has its own words for the work: an apple is a mazana, its tree a pumar, an orchard a pumarada¹⁴.

Where the sources disagree

• Cider before the Romans. The designation’s rules cite the geographer Strabo’s remark that “they also use zythos, and have little wine” (translated) as evidence that the Astures made cider¹; Buergo Fernández notes that only some authors consider pre-Roman cider proven, the first firm records being early medieval².
• Where the domestic apple came from. The rules say it was brought “from very ancient times by peoples of North Africa” (translated)¹; no other source read supports it.
• How many varieties. La Nueva España’s 2018 report counts 74 varieties after the 54 were added to 22⁵; the current rules list 76¹.
• Area. The rules give 6,500 ha of cider varieties, undated¹; the 2014 report gives about 5,832 ha³; the designation registered 979 ha in 2024⁹. No recent official figure for all cider orchards was found.
• Production. The official series counts all apples, table and cider together⁸; no separate cider-apple series was found.
• Harvest months come from the SERIDA’s ripening data and one season’s press report^11,7.
• Varieties. No ranking by area was found; the list gives eight of the 22 founding varieties.
• Elevation. No source gives the orchards’ altitude.