Region
Navarre
A region split between an Atlantic, Basque-speaking north where cider is made in the sagardotegi manner and a dry Mediterranean south that is wine country, making it the clearest illustration of where the cider line falls in northern Spain.
Known locally as Nafarroa.
Also written Navarra.
- Country
- Spain
- Parent region
- None — a top-level region
- Classification in use
- No named scheme recorded
- Protected designations
- None applying here
Described in full
- Shape
- A schematic strip of the north Spanish coast along the Bay of Biscay, running from Galicia in the west through Asturias and Cantabria to the Basque Country in the east. Three shaded zones mark the cider areas; the interior below is labelled as having no cider tradition.
- Why the band is so narrow
- Apples need the cool, wet Atlantic climate of the northern coast. The Meseta behind it is hot, dry and continental, and it is wine country rather than cider country. The line between the two is a climate boundary, not a cultural one.
- Asturias
- The largest Spanish cider region by a wide margin, with a protected designation of its own and a technological classification of its cultivars into acid, bitter and sweet groups that has no counterpart in the English scheme.
- Euskadi
- The Basque Country, drawn in a different fill because it is a separate tradition with its own protected name, its own cultivars, its own vocabulary and its own serving ritual. It is not a variant of the Asturian one.
- Galicia and Cantabria
- Both make cider and neither holds a protected name. They are drawn to show that the band does not stop at the two famous regions, and drawn faintly because the scale is much smaller.
- Precision
- Every shape here is indicative. The coastline is simplified to the point of being diagrammatic, and each zone marks roughly where a cider region sits rather than how far it reaches; no area on this figure is drawn to a boundary. Nothing should be measured off it, and where an exact limit matters the designation specification is the authority.
Climate and land
The first thing to know about a cider region, because it sets what the fruit can be. Ripening date, the acid that survives to the press and the sugar that reaches the vat are all decided here, and they are what makes one tradition's answers wrong for another's fruit.
Navarre is bisected by climate. The northern valleys — Baztan, Bortziriak, Malerreka and the country towards the French border — are Atlantic: wet through the year, humid, mild in winter, cool in summer, with the same limited heat accumulation that governs the Basque and Asturian coasts. The Ebro basin in the south is a different world, hot and dry in summer with cold winters and low rainfall, and it grows wine, cereals and vegetables. Apples for cider belong entirely to the north, where slow ripening under cloud produces moderate sugar and well-retained acid, and where humidity makes disease management the central orchard problem. The transition between the two zones is short and abrupt, and the practical boundary of the cider country follows the watershed rather than any administrative line.
Soils
Acid soils over sandstone and flysch in the northern valleys, on steep slopes with rapid drainage. Fertility is moderate; the terrain, rather than the soil, sets the limits on orchard size and layout.
The orchards
How the fruit is actually grown here — tree form, planting, what else the ground is used for, and who owns it.
- Northern Navarrese orchards are hillside plantings attached to farmsteads, standard trees in grass, worked as one element of a mixed upland holding.
- The variety population is shared with Gipuzkoa and the French Basque provinces rather than with the rest of Spain, because the fruit tradition follows the Basque cultural area rather than the regional boundary.
- Orchards are small and dispersed, and fruit is often pressed at a cider house rather than on the farm where it grew.
- Replanting since the late twentieth century has drawn on Basque variety work and on the same revival that rebuilt the Gipuzkoan sector.
- Southern Navarre grows fruit commercially, but as dessert and processing fruit within an irrigated Ebro valley horticulture, not as cider fruit.
The words used here
Each of these names something the tradition does. They are given in the local language because that is the form a reader will meet them in — on a label, on a cider-house door, or in a conversation about how the cider is poured.
| Term | Language | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| sagardo | Basque | Cider in Basque, and the ordinary word for it in the northern Navarrese valleys. |
| sagardotegi | Basque | A cider house with its own vats, open for a defined winter and spring season. |
| txotx | Basque | The call that opens a vat, and the practice of catching the jet in a glass and drinking the measure immediately. |
| Baztan | Basque | One of the northern Navarrese valleys where the Atlantic climate, the Basque language and the cider tradition all continue south of the French border. |
History
How cider making here came to take the shape it has.
- Cider making in northern Navarre belongs to the Basque tradition and is documented alongside it, with the same medieval municipal regulation of production and sale.
- The region’s cider declined for the same reasons as Gipuzkoa’s: rail access to cheap Ebro and Rioja wine, rural depopulation and orchard loss through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Revival from the 1980s onwards followed the Basque model, including the reopening of cider houses operating a seasonal txotx.
- Navarrese producers may fall within the protected designation for Basque cider where they meet its area and variety requirements, which is a rare instance of a designation crossing a Spanish regional boundary along cultural rather than administrative lines.
- The northern valleys remain small producers by Spanish standards, and their sector is closely integrated with Gipuzkoa’s.
Culture
What the drink is for here, and the occasions and rooms it belongs to. This is not decoration around the cider — in several of these places it is the part that decides how the cider is made.
- The cider house season and the txotx pour operate in northern Navarre as they do in Gipuzkoa, with the same standing service from the vat and the same fixed menu.
- Basque is the working language of the drink in the northern valleys, and cider vocabulary is Basque rather than Castilian.
- Cider in southern Navarre has no comparable social role; the drinking culture there is a wine culture.
- The contrast between the two halves of the region is well understood locally and is discussed in terms of climate and language rather than of preference.
About Navarre
Navarre is where the cider line in Spain can actually be seen. Drive north from the Ebro and within an hour the vines stop, the rain starts, the language changes and cider houses appear. The region contains both a Mediterranean wine country and an Atlantic cider country, and the boundary between them is a watershed rather than a border.
The northern valleys belong culturally and agriculturally to the Basque cider tradition. Their fruit varieties are Basque, their cider houses operate the same seasonal txotx, their vocabulary is Basque, and their producers may qualify for the Basque protected designation despite lying outside the Basque Autonomous Community. That is an unusual arrangement: a designation whose boundary follows a cultural and climatic region rather than an administrative one.
Chemically nothing here differs from Gipuzkoa. Cool, wet, cloudy seasons give moderate sugar and retained acid; wild fermentation and complete malolactic conversion give a dry, sharp, low-alcohol cider with a lactic edge; the drink is not filtered and not carbonated, and the momentary liveliness that matters comes from the jet breaking in the glass.
The scale is small and the sector is closely tied to its neighbour’s. Navarre’s value to a reader is less as a separate tradition than as the clearest available demonstration that cider regions are made by climate and culture together, and that regional maps drawn for administration rarely coincide with either.
The fruit grown here
Cultivars recorded as grown in this region, historically or currently. Each card says what the fruit is.
Cider apple
Txalaka
The most widely recognised Basque cider apple: a hard, sharp, late cultivar from Gipuzkoa that supplies much of the acid backbone of *sagardoa*.
Cider apple
Errezil
A celebrated Basque russet reinette from the village of Errezil, primarily an eating and cooking apple with a protected reputation, and used in cider where the crop allows.
Cider apple
Goikoetxe
An aromatic Basque cultivar from Bizkaia, valued for the fruit character it brings to a blend that is otherwise built on acid.
Cider apple
Moko
A Basque bitter cultivar, one of the few in a region whose fruit is otherwise almost entirely acid, used in small proportion for the grip it supplies.
What is made here
Styles this region is where they come from, or where they are characteristically made.
Dry cider
Cider fermented out or finished so that little fermentable sugar remains, leaving acid, tannin and alcohol to carry the palate.
Sidra natural
The still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, wild-fermented from local high-acid fruit and poured from a height to raise a momentary sparkle.
Euskal Sagardoa
Basque cider under its own protected designation, made from Basque-grown apples in the *sagardotegi* tradition of barrel service and dry, high-acid, still cider.
Still cider
Cider with no perceptible dissolved carbon dioxide, presented as a fermented fruit drink whose texture rests on body, acid and tannin alone.
Wild-fermented cider
Cider fermented by the yeast population already present on the fruit and in the cellar, without an added cultured strain.
Methods traditional here
Processes that belong to this region's practice rather than being applied to it from outside.
Blending
Combining separate lots of cider or perry into one, which in cider is the historically normal way of making the drink rather than a remedy applied when single lots disappoint.
Fermentation malolactique
Malolactic fermentation
A bacterial conversion of sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid, which lowers acidity, changes aroma, and in most traditional cider happens whether it was planned or not.
Fermentation spontanée
Wild fermentation
Letting the microflora already present on the fruit and in the press house carry the ferment, in a succession rather than as a single organism.
Hydraulic pressing
Pressing in which a pump drives fluid against a ram, so that a small pumped pressure becomes a large, controllable and repeatable load on the pomace.
Fermentation vessels
The container a cider ferments in — wood, stainless, plastic, glass or concrete — and how its permeability, thermal mass and resident microflora shape the result.
Fruit sorting
Taking rotten, mouldy and damaged fruit and foreign material out of the crop before it reaches the mill, which is the primary control on patulin in cider.
recogida
Shaking and collecting
Bringing fruit down with a pole or letting it fall, then gathering it from the orchard floor — the traditional way most cider and perry fruit has always been harvested.
Standard orchard systems
Widely spaced, tall-trunked, long-lived fruit trees over grassland — a family of related but genuinely different systems running from the Three Counties through Normandy to the Austrian meadows.
Protected designations that apply here
No protected designation or national definition on CiderHQ reserves a name for this area. That is a fact about the register rather than about the cider: a great deal of excellent cider is made in places no designation covers, and a designation would say nothing about how good it is.
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- How do you blend cider
- What is malolactic fermentation — Malolactic fermentation is a bacterial conversion of sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid, releasing carbon dioxide. It lowers total acidity and raises pH, and in cider it is often the source of a farmyard or buttery note as well.
- What should i ferment cider in — Anything inert, cleanable and closable: glass demijohns, food-grade plastic, stainless steel, or a wooden cask if you can keep it sound. Vessel shape and material change how much oxygen the cider sees and how fast it clears.
- What is sidra natural — Sidra natural is the still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, bottled without added carbonation and poured from a height to rouse it. It is tart, funky and made to be drunk in small measures poured one at a time.
- What is a hydraulic cider press
Where to go next
- Cider and perry in Spain — The national picture this region sits inside, including how cider is legally defined there.
- All cider regions — The other traditions, each described in its own terms.
- Protected designations — What the law reserves a name for, and what it does not promise.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Euskal Sagardoa / Sidra Natural del País Vasco protected designation
Eusko Label / Basque Government · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
NEIKER Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development
NEIKER · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24