Valdepeñas

The area around Valdepeñas has been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age, when people built watchtowers and platforms on the surrounding hills — structures long misidentified as Celtiberian but in fact older, contemporary with the El Argar culture.

The most significant prehistoric site is the Cerro de las Cabezas, a large fortified Iberian settlement belonging to the Oretani people, occupied roughly between the 4th and 1st centuries BC. At its peak it may have held around 5,000 inhabitants — estimated at about one percent of the entire Iberian Peninsula's population at the time. The site, located 8 km south of Valdepeñas beside the A-4 motorway, is one of the largest archaeological sites in Ciudad Real province. Recent excavations have uncovered possible evidence of early viticulture, and unusually for Oretani culture, some human skeletal remains that may point to ritual sacrifice. A visitor centre and the site itself are open to the public.

Roman remains include funerary stones, coins, and villa foundations found near the later Trinitarian convent, and a Roman winery discovered at El Peral in 2021. During the Islamic period the area belonged to the Kingdom of Toledo; remnants of a fortress wall from that era survive in the fabric of the church of the Asunción, which still bears Arabic inscriptions and a sundial on its southern facade. Local oral tradition holds that residents obtained a caliphate dispensation permitting them to grow vines and handle wine, otherwise forbidden under the Quran.

The town of Valdepeñas was formally founded around the church of the Asunción — the old fortress — by order of Queen Berenguela of Castile following the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, consolidating several smaller settlements. It appears in written records by 1243, when the Order of Calatrava's archives mention a commander of Valdepeñas. The Order required incoming settlers from Castile, León, Galicia, and Aragon to maintain the vineyards that had survived through the Islamic period — a condition that shaped the town's character for centuries.