Laguardia is not only one of the most beautiful small towns in Spain, thanks to an untouched mediaeval heritage. It also hosts a unique winemaking heritage.
This mediaeval town was established by the Kings of Navarre in the Early Middle Ages. This was a border area in a time of changing alliances between the various Christian and Muslim kingdoms that occupied the Iberian Peninsula. The town’s two churches and several houses are integrated in its wall, that has been completely preserved to this day.
Laguardia in Spanish literally means “The Guard”. As it was a border outpost, underground defensive tunnels criss-cross the old town – they call them calados, which means ‘soaked’, and their walls really are humid.
When Ferdinand of Aragon, the Catholic King, conquered Navarre in 1512, it ceased to be a border town so these tunnels were no longer needed, but another use was found for them: the humidity and temperature levels due to the composition of its material made them ideal to keep wine. Nowadays, two wineries still age their wine in Laguardia’s calados. In this trip, we visit one of them, that actually carries out the whole process inside the city walls.
Laguardia is next to Elciego, a village famous for its wineries, especially the giant Marqués de Riscal, which we also visited.
Getting there
Laguardia is a municipality of the province of Álava, in the Basque Country. It is located in the Rioja wine region (in the part known as Rioja alavesa). It is 64 km from Vitoria, 160 km from San Sebastián (where we were coming from in this trip) and 340 km from Madrid (where we were heading, back home).
Laguardia is small and it doesn’t have bus nor train stations, so the best way to arrive is by car. It is also the most comfortable way to visit the wineries, towns and villages in Rioja. You can find the best rental car deals in rentalcars.com.
If you prefer arriving by public transport, you should first travel by train or bus to Logroño or Vitoria, and take an interurban bus from its respective bus station to Laguardia. It takes 25 minutes to arrive from Logroño and 55 min from Vitoria. You can check the timetables here.
You can use the search form below to find flights to Bilbao or Vitoria and arrive directly in the Basque country!
Where to stay
There are many hotels and apartments in the area, but we recommend you to stay one night in Laguardia, so you can enjoy its unique charm in the evening and eat some pintxos with wine without having to drive.
We stayed at Hotel Marixa. Its rooms with balcony are very comfortable, but the best is the location. As it is just across the city walls, the view is fantastic! At night, the walls are illuminated so you can take nice pictures from your balcony. On the other side, the view of the vineyards is great too. You can also park next to it, which is quite comfortable.
If you are looking for a higher-end experience, you should stay at Hospedería de los Parajes, on the main street of Laguardia’s old town, is probably the most famous hotel in town. It is a fantastic place to stay, with its own winery and spa.
If you want to look for the best hotel deals in Laguardia and the surrounding area, please use the search form below.
The Old Town
Walking in Laguardia is a real delight. Its pedestrian streets take you to another time, away from our stressful modern life, and allow you to enjoy Basque and Riojan cuisuine. But there is also a unique monument in this town, that shines above the rest of its buildings. A must see if you enter its mediaeval wall: the Church of Saint Mary of the Kings (Santa María de los Reyes)
The construction of Santa María de los Reyes started in the 12th century, but only a crypt has been preserved from that time. Most of the features we we admire today are from the 14th century, and its enlargement in the 16th c. In its interior, the evolution in architecture techniques and styles is obvious, with an original bridge between both eras that preserves its harmony.
What makes this church special are not its nave or altars, but the magnificient painted portal at the entrance of the temple. The portal was carved at the end of the 14th c. and painted in the 17th c. Between the carving and the polychromy, a chapel was built around this entrance, which was later crucial to protect the masterpiece from the rainy and windy weather, and preserve perfectly the original colours of one of the few polychrome portals that still exist in Europe.
The portal can only be visited with a guided tour (3 €) at scheduled hours. We highly recommend you to book the tour in advance, because group sizes are limited. You can do so by writing an e-mail to turismo@laguardia-alava.com.
The visit starts with a thorough audiovisual explanation of the portal in which each of its elements is lit, so the visitor can take his time admiring each of them and understanding better the meaning of the artpiece as a whole.
We had our tour at 13:15, so we finished at the perfect time to eat some tapas, including some stuffed Piquillo peppers (a very tasty pepper variety autochthonous to Navarre), before heading to the other reason that brought us to Laguardia: wine.
Rioja wine
We visited two wineries: the powerhouse Marqués de Riscal and tiny El Fabulista, inside Laguardia’s walls.
Marqués de Riscal
Marqués de Riscal started making wine in 1858. This makes it Álava’s oldest winery. Nowadays, it is a huge winemaker, producing 7 million bottles yearly, of which 65% are exported to over 110 countries. Marqués de Riscal Reserva, its flagship wine, is probably the most easy to find Rioja in any European supermarket.
This wine is what many have in mind when they think about Rioja, even though Marqués de Riscal is exceptionally allowed to use small quantities of Cabernet Sauvignon, not considered a regional variety by the regulating council of D.O.Ca. (Qualified Designation of Origin) Rioja. This is because Marqués de Riscal was using it long before the designation of origin and its regulations were created. It is a very good and full-bodied wine, made by oenologists with modern production and analysis technologies to ensure product consistency. It is a modern industrial winery, unlike the one we will visit later.
The company has expanded its business to other Spanish wine regions, especially to Rueda, where they were really important for the rebirth of the Verdejo autochthonous variety, that was close to disappear due to phylloxera, and has since become very trendy in Spain and Europe as one of the best value for price white wines.
We highly recommend visiting this winery. You should make a reservation following this link. The visit and basic tasting costs now 19 €, and they offer two further options with a tasting of more premium wine.
This time we took the English tour, and it is much worse than in Spanish. They tell you a lot more stuff in Spanish, not only the basics, so if you understand Spanish, that will make it more enjoyable. It is true that the group we shared the visit with did not help the guide: they did not seem to have much interest in interacting, including a young French couple who were just taking selfies all around and some Americans who looked like they didn’t know where they were.
In 2006, the famous architect Frank Gehry built a hotel inside the winery complex, which was renamed as the Wine City (Ciudad del Vino). It is a luxury hotel with spa and a great view over the winery, its vineyards and the village of Elciego. You can book a room following this link.
The building reminds immediately to Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, another of this works – just more colourful, as he added an elegant violet representing wine and the golden of the net covering Marqués de Riscal Reserva bottles.
An interesting practice of Marqués de Riscal is keeping 1000 bottles of wine every year for special occasions, not for sale. For example, they say that to convince Frank Gehry to build the hotel, they opened with him a bottle from his year of birth (1929). These bottles are opened by breaking their necks with red-hot iron tongs, as their corks cannot be screwed safely. Sometimes, a bottle is opened just to discover that its contents have not been preserved and it has to be thrown away.
We started the visit at 16:30 and it is approximately 1h30 long, including wine tasting. This includes a glass of Verdejo from their Rueda winery and one of its famous Rioja Reserva, along with some local chorizo and salchichón.
El Fabulista
We finished in Riscal around 6 pm and we went back to Laguardia to visita completely contrasting winery. We had booked our tour at 7 in a very special winery.
El Fabulista is the only winery in Laguardia that still carries out the whole winemaking process inside Laguardia’s walls: there they stomp grapes, obtain the wort, ferment it and age their crianza and reserva wines (other producers age the wines in calados but ferment it outside the old town). Its location in a square next to one of the gates of mediaeval Laguardia allows trucks to take the grapes to the winery from its vineyards.
The wine is located in the house of Félix María de Samaniego, an 18th century fabulist which can be thought of as the Spanish Grimm brothers. Each of the wines is dedicated to one of his fables, with a funny drawing related to it in the front label and its full text on the back.
The visit was very interesting and our guide was talkative and funny. It is a winery tour and a visit to mediaeval defensive tunnels at the same time. El Fabulista does not employ oenologists, but a master winemaker, and there is not so much technology to control and analyse the process, so the product varies more from year to year. Their wines are not even found in Madrid, but they assured us they are the locals’ favourites.
In the 1860s, phylloxera entered Europe through the French Midi, brought by an American vine variety. This meant a lot of trouble for French winemakers, and many producers from Bordeaux crossed the border and came to Rioja to continue making wine there. This brought Bordeaux techniques to Rioja (which was free of phylloxera for some more decades), which were quickly adopted and used today by most wineries.
Visits to El Fabulista are only in Spanish. They also organise “fable visits“, in which Samaniego’s wife shows you the winery.
The wines made by El Fabulista are D.O.Ca. Rioja and therefore have to follow the council’s rules: they use mainly tempranillo. However, unlike most Rioja wines (and all of big commercial wineries), they still use the carbonic maceration method (like in Beaujolais), as they were doing before the French arrived in Rioja. Their white wine is not made in the winery – even if it is a Rioja, this is a land of red wines.
The visit finishes with the tasting of two of their wines: young (no ageing), and crianza (aged at least 12 months). Their wines have a unique character and high quality. As they explain in the tour, it is not age that determines the quality of a wine, but the quality of the grapes from which it is made. With low-quality grapes, it is impossible to make good wines. So there are good and bad crianzas, good and bad reservas (if you pay 5 € for a bottle, don’t expect much)… although one must be quite stupid to use bad grapes for a gran reserva. This may seem obvious, that many people look first and foremost at the ageing or year when they buy a wine.
Anywan, Fabulista’s young red wine is of an extraordinary quality: light, yet well-rounded and comforting. It is great to drink without food, unlike many cheap young wines that lack everything. Sometimes, the problem is not that a wine has not been kept long enough in a barrel, but that the grape was bad from the beginning.
It was a Friday, and when we left El Fabulista we discovered that in Laguardia Friday means pintxo-pote. That’s how the Basques call that day in which you get a free pintxo for each drink (even if getting some free tapa is common in many areas of Spain, it is not usual North of Madrid). So we explored the bars of the walled town to dine with some of those delicious miniature dishes with good local red wines. Sure, they were not like the amazing haute-cuisine-in-a-small-plate we had in San Sebastián, but still good (and actually in one of the bars the free treat was a less elevated pork belly sandwich).
We had to warm up bearing in mind that in that mid August evening the temperature dropped… to 10 ºC!
