Montesdeoca Cheese Farm TenerifeOne‑Hour Guided Visit with Tasting

An hour on a working cheese farm

Quesería Montesdeoca milks 450 goats and sheep at Tijoco Bajo, inland above the south-west coast of Tenerife, and turns the milk into cheese in a dairy on the same site. The guided visit lasts an hour and runs daily. You walk through the farm, watch the cheese being made, and finish at the tasting board.

What you see

The walk starts among the animals. The flock is worked every day, so the barns and the milking are whatever is happening that morning.

In the dairy the curd is cut and then lifted into the moulds by hand, which is how every cheese here is made. Standing at the vat while three people fill the moulds is the part of the hour that explains the rest of it.

The visit ends at the board. What is on it is what the farm makes from its own milk: fresh cheese, semi-cured, aged, some of it rubbed with gofio or oregano. The tasting is sold two ways, one with cheese and one with cheese and wine.

The awards

The dairy has taken a prize at the World Cheese Awards every year since 2010, including the Super Gold award twice, which in any given year goes to a handful of cheesemakers worldwide. It also wins regularly at the Canary Islands contests, Pinolere and Agrocanarias among them. The certificates hang in the room where the tasting happens.

Worth knowing

The farm is at km 44 of the TF-82, about twenty minutes inland from the resorts of the south-west. It sits high enough to see La Gomera on one side and the cliffs of Los Gigantes on the other. Wear shoes you do not mind taking through a barn. There are rates for children aged 5 to 12 and for under-fives, and the animals are part of the visit for them.