Here, the river means both, life and wine. Life spreads all over the place and introduces itself inside the several farmhouses that watch the river from the hills. The wine creeps up the river and possesses the banks where it has been grown at least from the mediaeval times. Among the autochthonous grape varieties, Treixadura is the queen. It has always been a source of wealth and the Ribeiro wines reason of being. Thanks this grape variety Ribeiro wines became internationally renowned as one of the best white wines in the world. Wine means here an identity feature. By growing it, the locals became sculptors of a highly modified landscape, both physically and culturally. The natural shape of hills and banks was modelled into terraces to make them more appropriate for the production of grapevines. Not changed enough, this landscape accepted other complementary plant species. Roads and bridges were built to allow the commercialization of this wine. History witnessed the built up of castles, farms, monasteries and wineries. Implantation, production and expansion quickly took place. Wine is the cause of a high population rate in the Ribeiro area; it is the common thread of the Ribeiro history and identity. Throughout history, every single social group or class had an important role in the exploitation of the Ribeiro wines. Royal families, great monasteries and cathedral chapters gave land concessions or charged taxes; in the meanwhile aristocrats acted as the mediator between the highest power and the peasant mass. Peasants were at same time working force and source of abusive tax benefits, it didn’t matter natural disasters or bad crops. White and black monks, templar monks, cannon priests and priest, lords, knights and its squires, notaries and scribes, craftsmen, burghers, merchants and stockists, they all came to the Ribeiro region to settle down. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the Roman invasion that wine started being grown in the Ribeiro del Avia area. They introduced it as an experiment in their farms and soon it spread to nearly every cultivation field. We also owe to the Romans our main roads that allowed the wine commercialization. The Ribeiro do Avia distric counts with two social focal points since the Middle Ages: the Monastery of San Clodio and the Borough of Ribadavia. The Monastery of San Clodio was the religious, farming and intellectual centre; while Ribadavia concentred the civil and feudal power. The Galician writer José María Castroviejo described Ribadavia as a village “full of vine leaves and history”. Both, San Clodio and Ribadavia grew in parallel directions thanks to the exploitation of wine. San Clodio grew through the management of the lands, farms and the wineries spread all over the most fertile lands of the Ribeiro do Avia district; and Ribadavia grew specially as a commerce centre for this same wine. New wine experts, burghers and craftsmen, came and stayed in the town that concentrated the commercial and political power. Nevertheless, religious and political power did not always co-live in peace. A good sample of their lack of understanding is what the nobleman Pedro Madruga did to San Clodio’s abbot: “he caught and exhibited him tied to a donkey’s back and wearing a garlic necklace”. Nobility longed for the church’s enormous amount of properties, that after several confrontations, they eventually got. San Clodio’s splendour slowly faded away for a long time, until the final 19th century ecclesiastical confiscation. Unfortunately, San Clodio’s decadence had already started before the 19th century with the arrival of nasty vine diseases, such as Powdery Mimdew, Mildew or Phylloxera. These new diseases brought a progressive loss of prestige over the brand “ribiero”, due to the adulteration, smuggling and all sort of clandestine activities related to the “noble Ribeiro wines”.