Village
Municipality of the comarca of La Mancha, in the province of Ciudad Real, whose subsoil holds some 2,300 caves dug out to keep wine, given away at street level by the grated light shafts, and whose countryside is dotted with bombos, circular dry-stone buildings raised in the second half of the nineteenth century as shelters for farmers. The wine surpluses fed a distilling industry of national standing from the nineteenth century onwards; on the Plaza de España it preserves the Posada de los Portales, of the seventeenth century, and it is the birthplace of the writer Francisco García Pavón, creator of the constable Plinio and winner of the 1969 Nadal Prize.
Monument
The Posada de los Portales, on the Plaza de España in Tomelloso, dates back to the 17th century as a farmhouse and travelers' inn, its characteristic arcades still recognizable today. It was declared a monumento histórico artístico de interés provincial (a provincial-level heritage protection designation) on March 1, 1982, by an order published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on June 3 of that same year. Later converted into a cultural center, it now houses the tourist office and exhibition rooms spread throughout its galleries.
Monument
The Museum of the Cart and Farm Tools, an ethnographic museum in Tomelloso founded in the 1960s, brings together more than 400 objects related to agricultural work, domestic life and winemaking, along with graphic and photographic documents. On October 20, 1970, a bombo built in dry stone by Pablo Moreno using more than two million stones was inaugurated on its grounds; these constructions typical of the area, with a round-arched entrance and a chimney, were used to shelter farmers in the fields and store their tools, and today house rooms dedicated to farm laborers, tools and working animals. Since 1996 the museum has also had a training workshop school, which has built the Cocinilla Manchega and is working on a traditional inn of La Mancha.
Monument
Circular dry-stone structures raised in the second half of the 19th century that served farmers as shelters and temporary dwellings. The dry-stone technique is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
Nature
Beneath Tomelloso lie some 2,300 caves dug out to keep wine, whose presence is given away at street level by the grated vents visible in the pavement.
Monument
A museum opened in 1986 and dedicated to the work of the painter Antonio López Torres, born in Tomelloso, whose painting of the light and landscape of La Mancha shaped an entire realist school. Born and died in the town (1902-1987), uncle of the also painter Antonio López García, whom he introduced to the profession, he studied at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de Ciudad Real and at the Real Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, although he spent almost his entire career in his home town, combining painting with fieldwork. At his express wish, he donated to the municipality more than a hundred works, both canvases and drawings, now gathered in the museum, which has free admission, among which stand out Autorretrato (1921), from his youthful period, and mature works such as El pastor.
Monument
A museum in Tomelloso (Ciudad Real) opened on November 23, 2011, with a surface area of 1700 square meters spread over four floors. It houses the permanent collection of Spanish contemporary art that the Cooperativa Virgen de las Viñas has been acquiring over the years through the cultural competition organized by the entity itself, in addition to occasional temporary exhibitions.
Curiosity
The Sociedad Cooperativa Vinícola Virgen de las Viñas of Tomelloso (La Mancha, Ciudad Real), with an average harvest of 150 million kilos of grapes, is considered the largest winery in Europe and the second largest in the world, behind only the American E&J Gallo Winery of California, a reflection of the city's wine-growing importance.
Activity
The pilgrimage of the Virgen de las Viñas is held in Tomelloso on the last Sunday of April, in honor of the town's patron saint, whose devotion arrived after the Civil War as a result of a popular mission given by a Claretian friar from Aranda de Duero, the original birthplace of this Marian devotion. According to tradition, some residents of Quintanilla de las Viñas, in Burgos, fled with the image in the face of the Muslim invasion and took refuge near the Duero river, where the Virgin later appeared to a farmer to show him where the image was hidden and where the hermitage should be built. In Tomelloso, the image is venerated at the sanctuary in the Pinilla area, four kilometers toward Pedro Muñoz, which besides the pilgrimage also hosts the fair on August 25.
Activity
The Feria de Tomelloso is held during the last week of August at the fairground located between the Parque de la Constitución and Calle Lugo, which fills up with stalls, tombola stands and rides. For a week, activities for all audiences are organized both at the fairground and in the Plaza de España and several parks of the municipality. It is one of the most crowded fairs in the region and in Spain: it is visited by more than three hundred thousand people, who together spend around fifteen million euros.
Historical milestone
Writer born in Tomelloso in 1919 and deceased in Madrid in 1989. He created the municipal police chief Plinio, protagonist of a series of detective novels set in the village; with Las Hermanas Coloradas he won the Nadal Prize of 1969.
Historical milestone
The first idea of bringing the railway to Tomelloso dates from 1852, with a route that was to link Ciudad Real with Socuéllamos passing through Manzanares, Argamasilla de Alba and Tomelloso itself, where a station was already built on the edge of town in 1853. The General Railway Law of 1855 changed the route so that the Madrid-Alicante line branched off at Alcázar de San Juan rather than at Socuéllamos, which left out Argamasilla and Tomelloso. The railway did not actually arrive until 1914, in the form of a branch line to the Ciudad Real hamlet of Cinco Casas, which gave an outlet to local wines and spirits before the service, unviable from the late 1960s onwards, ended up being discontinued a little more than half a century later.
Food and drink
From the nineteenth century on, wine surpluses fed a distilling industry that made Tomelloso a benchmark centre for wine alcohol in Spain. From its holandas come brandies aged in oak that are still made in the town.