Send Gift Baskets to Jerez de la Frontera, Spain

There is evidence of human presence in the area since the upper Neolithic. Humans have inhabited Jerez de la Frontera since at least the Copper or Neolithic Age, though the identity of the first natives is unclear. The Tartessians are credited with the first major protohistoric settlement in the area (around 3000 BC). It was later renamed Asta Regia (located 8 km further north at Cortijo el Rosario) after the Romans conquered the city.

Vandals and Visigoths ruled the area after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire until the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the early 8th century. For a brief period, it served as the seat of an independent taifa in the 11th century. The city was ruled by ‘Abdun ibn Muhammad for some years following its union with Arcos de la Frontera (ca. 1040-1053). During the 1053 Annexed Kingdom of Seville, it became a part of that city. Arcos and Jerez briefly operated as an emirate under the dependency of Granada, led by Abu’l-Qasim Ahyal, between 1145 and 1147. The Almohads later conquered the town. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Jerez underwent significant development, and it built its defense system and laid out its current street layout.

It was in Jerez that the Battle of Jerez took place in 1231. Despite the numerical superiority of the Emir Ibn Hud, Christian troops commanded by Lvaro Pérez de Castro, lord of the Castro House and grandson of Alfonso VII, king of Castile and León, defeated the armies of the Emir Ibn Hud. The city’s Muslim population remained after the city surrendered after a month-long siege in 1261. Eventually, it was defeated in 1264 after rebelling.

Jerez’s agriculture-based economy and demographics made it one of the most important cities of Lower Andalusia from the middle ages onward.

With the discovery of the Americas and the conquest of Granada in 1492, Jerez became one of the most prosperous cities of Andalusia through trade and its proximity to the ports of Seville and Cadiz. As a result of the economic opportunities offered by the winemaking business, a substantial number of foreign Europeans settled in the city (English, Flemish, Portuguese, and most notably, Genoese). They enslaved people in collaboration with the wealthy class of the local area.

Despite the social, economic, and political decadence of the seventeenth century, the city maintained a reasonable pace of development, becoming world-famous for its wine.