Alto Douro wine region is a representative area that characterizes the vast Douro Demarcated Region, the oldest regulated wine-growing region in the world and where some of the best wines in the world are produced, Douro wine and Port wine.
With the recent distinction and international recognition of excellence of the Alto Douro wine Region, one of the region’s main achievements since its classification by UNESCO 15 years ago, Portugal is once again in the mouths of the world.
Nature, history, culture, gastronomy and handcrafts. In this land of the brave, everything is found and nobody is indifferent to it.
The cultural landscape of the Alto Douro combines the monumental nature of the Douro River valley, made up of steep slopes and poor, rugged soils, with the ancestral and continuous action of men, adapting the space to the Mediterranean-type agricultural needs that the region supports. This intimate relationship between human activity and nature allowed the creation of a unique value ecosystem. Where the terrain features are taken advantage of an exemplary way, with the modeling of terraced landscape, preserving it from erosion and allowing the cultivation of the vineyard.
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According to António Barreto,
“In Douro the men broke the stone, made the earth, erected walls, built thousands of kilometers of terraces, saw up, valley in, leapt the rivers, searched for water, and marked places to live. They planted, grafted, pruned the vines, picked the grapes, trodden, transported, and lastly made the wine (… ). And the wine made a region, made the lots, the farms and the huts. He made the wineries and the Carden; the kites and the rabelos; the rich and the poor. Nothing important, in the Douro, is independent of wine.”
This is the extraordinary wine region that produces the famous Port wine. Representing the main vector of dynamization of technology, culture, traditions and local economy. The great human investment in this landscape of singular beauty made possible the settlement of the populations from the distant Roman occupation, and from it resulted a living and evolving reality, at the same time a testimony of the past and the motor of the future, solidly anchored in the optimization of natural resources and in preserving the environment.