“Unique Moments”

“Unique Moments” is a wine tourism project offering guided tours of Fermoselle’s underground heritage, which aims to turn the town into a driving force for development in the region.

The initiative of the Duero-Douro EGTC belongs to the tourism projects ‘VinDuero International Wine Route’ and ‘TerraDuero: Tourism & Heritage’, which aim to position the Spanish-Portuguese border as a quality tourist destination at an international level. The Duero-Douro EGTC has joined forces with the Fermoselle Town Council, winemakers and businesspeople to raise awareness of the hidden heritage treasures of the municipality.

The tours, which reveal the history, culture, gastronomy, ancestral popular architecture and most mysterious wine tourism of the town, are guided in Spanish by Adrián Pérez, Architectural Heritage, Museums and Art Market Manager, and in Portuguese by Filipa Melo, Master in Tourism Management and Planning.

Fermoselle is a village in Zamora, built on a stone massif whose interior hides ancestral folk architecture of enormous value. Several kilometres of galleries and passageways run through the depths of the village, where the cellars intertwine to create a vast underground network of great heritage value. Opening up this hidden world of underground cellars to tourism is a long-held aspiration that Fermoselle has managed to fulfil thanks to the initiative of the Duero-Douro EGTC: TerraDuero is the tourism brand of the border, and what we do is multiply the activities, culture and traditions on both sides of La Raya. This means that any tourist can enjoy Fermoselle and be on the other side of the border in half an hour. The border, now symbolic, has been and will always be an attraction, an incentive for the progress of the territory.

This first phase of the project involves a dozen wineries, which will soon be expanded and complemented with other wine tourism activities such as personalised tastings, where visitors can sample local products as an added bonus, and themed tours, such as the themed route through wineries with Jewish heritage, called ‘The 7 Steps of Wine’. These activities are conceived as a new tourist attraction and a driver of development. Fermoselle has a cultural heritage consisting of a network of labyrinthine streets that was one of the last Jewish strongholds in Spain during the Reconquista, with numerous hidden vestiges of the period that can be discovered by anyone interested thanks to the TerraDuero Tourism Destination Brand and the VinDuero International Wine Route.

‘Momentos Únicos’ offers tours every weekend (Saturdays and Sundays) in the morning and afternoon to showcase the extraordinary underground heritage of Fermoselle. The main objective of these activities is rural development and the promotion of the area's tourist potential. In this sense, Fermoselle is a key part of the network of municipalities that are attractive to tourists, not only because of its border with Portugal, but also as a natural balcony from which to look out over the Arribes del Duero Natural Park.