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Today, its name evokes the Mediterranean, beaches, festivals, Modernisme, celebrations and visitors from all over the world.
But long before all this, Sitges was something much simpler and perhaps much more essential. It was land. Land to cultivate, land to graze animals, land to store food, land to grow vines. And beneath the streets of the old town, archaeology still preserves the memory of that forgotten Sitges.
The history of Sitges did not begin with tourism, nor with the elegant houses facing the sea. Its origins go much further back. Archaeological excavations in the old town have revealed numerous underground silos used during Iberian, Roman and medieval times. These cavities were dug into the ground to store grain and other agricultural products, protecting the harvest that would feed the community throughout the year.
Those sitges -the Catalan word for silos- are generally considered to be behind the medieval name of the town. There is something wonderfully appropriate about it. The name of one of the best-known towns on the Mediterranean coast may ultimately come from something as humble as a hole in the ground where farmers stored grain. Before Sitges became an image, it was sustenance. Before it welcomed travellers, it stored harvests. And before its inhabitants looked towards distant horizons, they looked at the soil beneath their feet.
The landscape explains much of the story. Sitges and neighbouring Sant Pere de Ribes occupy a fascinating territory between the limestone massif of the Garraf and the Mediterranean Sea. It is not an easy landscape. The soil can be poor and stony. Water is scarce. Summers are dry. The mountains seem to descend almost directly towards the sea. But Mediterranean agriculture has always been an extraordinary exercise in adaptation.
Cereals, olive trees and vines became fundamental crops throughout this part of the Mediterranean world. Archaeological evidence from the Roman period in the area confirms precisely this agricultural pattern. Wheat and other cereals provided food. Olive trees provided oil. And vines provided wine. Three crops. Three pillars of Mediterranean civilisation. Bread, oil and wine. Products that were not merely food and drink, but elements of economy, trade, ritual and identity.
The Romans did not invent wine in the Iberian Peninsula. Vines and wine were already known here before Rome arrived. What Roman civilisation did extraordinarily well, however, was organise agricultural production and connect it to a vast commercial network. Wine could travel. Amphorae carried it along roads and across the Mediterranean, linking farms, settlements and ports with cities hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away. And Sitges was not isolated from this world.
Archaeological discoveries in its old town include imported materials from the central and eastern Mediterranean, evidence of the commercial importance of this coastal settlement during Antiquity.
The sea that today seems to define Sitges as a place of leisure was already defining it two thousand years ago as a place of communication. The Mediterranean was not a frontier. It was a road.
We cannot draw a straight historical line from the Roman vineyards of Sitges to today's Malvasia de Sitges. Centuries separate them. But we can speak of something perhaps more interesting: continuity of landscape. Generation after generation, people learned that vines could survive here. They learned the soil. They learned the wind. They learned the influence of the sea. And at some point during the Middle Ages, Malvasia became part of this landscape.
The grape has Mediterranean origins and its name is generally associated with Monemvasia, the Greek port from which wines of this type were traded throughout the Mediterranean. According to a beautiful local legend, the first Malvasia vines reached Sitges in the fourteenth century, brought back by an almogàver who had travelled east with the expedition of Roger de Flor. Whether the legend is literally true matters less than what it tells us. Once again, Sitges was connected to the Mediterranean. And once again, the sea brought something that the land would transform.
The grape adapted extraordinarily well. Over the centuries, Malvasia became so deeply associated with the town that it eventually acquired its own identity: Malvasia de Sitges.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was already one of the most important crops in the municipality. Historical research based on the 1716 cadastre shows that Malvasia occupied approximately 24 per cent of all cultivated land in Sitges. That is an extraordinary figure. Imagine the landscape. Forget the hotels. Forget the apartment buildings. Forget the crowded beaches. Forget the traffic. Look inland instead. Vines. Dry-stone walls. Farmhouses. Paths. Farmers. Animals. Carts carrying grapes after the harvest. Barrels waiting in cellars. That was also Sitges. And Malvasia was one of its treasures.
It was demanding to cultivate and produced less fruit than other varieties, but its wine was particularly valuable. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Malvasia from Sitges travelled far beyond the Garraf and became a prestigious commercial product. A tiny territory beside the Mediterranean was producing a wine capable of travelling across Europe and overseas. The land had become commerce.
But landscapes change. So do economies. Other grape varieties were more productive. Malvasia required considerable care. Then came phylloxera, which devastated European vineyards during the nineteenth century. Later came urban development. The land itself became valuable for something other than agriculture. Vines disappeared. Fields disappeared. The agricultural Sitges slowly retreated beneath the modern town. And Malvasia nearly disappeared with it.
Its survival owes much to one man: Manuel Llopis de Casades. When he died in 1935, aware that this centuries-old wine was in danger of vanishing, he left his vineyard at Aiguadolç and the family wine business to the Hospital de Sant Joan Baptista de Sitges, on the condition that the institution continued producing Malvasia. It was an extraordinary act of cultural preservation. He did not simply save a wine. He helped save a fragment of a landscape.
And this story does not stop at the municipal border. Sant Pere de Ribes belongs to the same agricultural world. Sitges and Ribes share the Garraf, the proximity of the Mediterranean, the vineyards, the farmhouses and generations of people who learned to work a difficult but generous landscape.
Today, Malvasia de Sitges is once again being cultivated and produced by wineries in this wider territory, including Sant Pere de Ribes. And perhaps that is exactly as it should be. Wine has never understood administrative borders particularly well. Vines understand soil. They understand rain. They understand sunlight. They understand wind and sea.
A friend of mine, Pep, recently gave me a bottle of Malvasia de Sitges produced in Ribes. And looking at that bottle made me think about everything contained inside it. Not only wine. There are centuries inside that bottle. There is the Mediterranean. There is the limestone of the Garraf. There are farmers whose names we will never know. There are Roman fields of cereals, olives and vines. There are underground silos where ancient inhabitants stored their harvests. There are medieval merchants. There are vineyards that once surrounded Sitges. There is the devastation of phylloxera. There is Manuel Llopis trying to save something he knew was about to disappear. There are the people who continued cultivating the grape when doing so was neither easy nor particularly profitable. And there are today's winegrowers who have decided that this old variety still deserves a place in the landscape.
Perhaps this is why wine can be so much more than a drink. Sometimes, wine is memory made liquid.
Gràcies, Pep
So this post is my way of saying thank you.
Thank you, Pep, for the bottle.
But especially, thank you for making me stop and think about the land it comes from. The next time I look at Sitges (and Ribes), I will try to look beyond the town we all know. I will imagine the silos beneath it. The grain stored underground. The Roman farmers. The olive trees. The vineyards. The animals and farmhouses. The harvests. And somewhere between the Garraf hills and the Mediterranean, rows of Malvasia vines catching the sea breeze.
Because places are not only what we see today. They are everything that happened there before us. And sometimes all we need to rediscover that history is a bottle of wine given by a friend.
To Pep -and to the land that remembers.
More information: Celler Can Pagès
de Sitjes; lo vi més grat
al paladar, comparat
per lo qu'es bó, á l'ambrosía.
It is the rich Malvasia of Sitges,
the wine most pleasing to the palate,
compared, for its goodness,
to ambrosia.
Lo millor de Sitjes, L'Esquella de la Torratxa (7 de maig de 1897)
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