Canary Islands rum: Arucas and ron miel
If you've been to the Canary Islands, you've probably seen it on a shop shelf: bottles of a drink whose colour runs from golden yellow to deep mahogany, and on the label two words, ron and miel, rum and honey. Most people buy it as honey rum.
Except that legally it isn't rum.
It isn't a liqueur either. European rules put it in a third drawer, and if you look into why, more than five hundred years of the islands' sugar history open up behind it, slave labour included. If you want to see how Canary rum is made, there are distilleries you can visit in Arucas on Gran Canaria and in San Andrés y Sauces on La Palma. You'll find their official websites at the end of the article.
What the law calls rum
The European Union's spirit drinks regulation, 2019/787, sets out exactly what rum is. It can only be made from sugar cane: from the molasses or syrup of cane sugar production, or from the cane juice itself, by fermentation and distillation. It is at least 37.5 % vol. It may not contain flavourings, and the finished product may contain no more than 20 grams of sweetening per litre.
Ronmiel falls outside this definition on almost every point. Its official name is Ronmiel de Canarias, written as one word. According to the product specification of the Canary Islands Government's quality institute (ICCA), it is made in the islands from honey, drinking water and rum. It may contain added sugar and flavourings. Its alcohol content is between 20 and 30 % vol, its total sugar content may not exceed 350 grams per litre, and it must contain at least 2 % honey by volume.
That is why the law files it neither as rum nor as a liqueur, but among the "other spirit drinks" (otras bebidas espirituosas), as a geographical indication. There is rum in it, but the drink itself is no longer rum.
Some product names spell it as two words, Ron Miel. The protected name, however, is written as one, so that is how we write it in the text too.
Two dates and an old advert
Ronmiel wasn't born on a lawyer's desk. According to the product specification, it used to be sold as a local drink in tascas, the small bars, and in roadside inns (ventas), and its name told you its two main ingredients. Industrial production came with the tourism boom, from 1950 onwards.
The specification also quotes an example from the period: issue 9 of Revista Arucas, from June 1953, offered "Ronmiel Las Colmenas, estilo Canario" in a half-page advert, under the name of C.O.C.A.L. According to a University of La Laguna dissertation, C.O.C.A.L., the Canary Cooperative of Spirits and Liqueurs (Cooperativa Canaria de Aguardientes y Licores), was founded in 1950, and one of the people behind it was a name we'll meet again in Arucas: Alfredo Martín Reyes. Spanish law was already referring to ronmiel as a traditional Canary drink in 1975, in Decree 1228/1975.
Protection came in two steps. The application was filed by the Asociación Industrial de Canarias, the Canary Islands industrial association, and the Canary Islands Government recognised the "Ronmiel de Canarias" geographical designation by an order of 21 September 2005. The EU listing followed on 13 February 2008, in Annex III of Regulation 110/2008, among the other spirit drinks.
How is it made? According to the specification, a syrup is first mixed from water and honey, to which sugar and flavourings may also be added, and then enough rum is added to bring the alcohol content to between 20 and 30 %. On the nose honey dominates, with rum coming through only in hints, and on the palate it is sweet and smooth (untuoso). According to an undated figure from the Canary Islands Government, around one and a half million litres are made each year, of which about 46,000 litres are exported.
When "miel" didn't yet mean bee honey
The specification itself states that the story of ronmiel is necessarily bound up with the story of sugar cane.
The first sugar mills (ingenios) and cane plantations appeared in the 1480s on Gran Canaria and La Gomera, and after the end of the conquest on La Palma and Tenerife as well. Soil and climate favoured cane only on these four islands, and even there only in some places, below 400 metres. Sugar was an expensive, coveted commodity in Europe, and in the islands it became very profitable.
The skilled workers came largely from Portugal, mainly from Madeira. The hardest work, growing the cane and hauling cane and firewood, was done by slaves: mostly Black slaves brought from Cape Verde, but there were also Moriscos and indigenous Canarians among them. The title of a 2022 study on the archaeology of Canary sugar is "Oro blanco", white gold. This, too, was the price of white gold.
Boiling produced the "mieles", the honeys, which had nothing to do with bees. From them came remiel, which was shipped to Flanders, France and occasionally to Barbary, in North Africa. So the word "miel" was already there in the sugar mills, it just meant something quite different from what it means on a bottle of ronmiel today.
The peak ran from the late 15th century to the late 16th. In the second half of the 16th century, competition from plantations in the Americas and on the coast of present-day Morocco took the profits away, and by the end of the 17th century only three mills were left: Adeje in the south of Tenerife, and Tazacorte and Argual on the west side of La Palma. The first Canary sugar mill to be excavated is Las Candelarias in Agaete, built in 1494 by the Genoese Francisco de Palomares; its remains came to light in 2005. We wrote about Agaete and Puerto de las Nieves in the series' article of 29 October.
And the rum? Citing unnamed "literature", the specification dates the first Canary aguardiente to 1500, distilled by the friars of the Convento de San Francisco in Las Palmas. According to the historian Luxán Meléndez, industrial distillation only came with the "second sugar cycle", which he places between 1852 and 1936.
Arucas, 9 August 1884
In Arucas, in the north of Gran Canaria, cane ruled the landscape twice. In the 16th century its many sugar mills brought a significant boom. After the crisis at the end of that century came vineyards and mixed farming (Canary wines and wineries have an article of their own), and then the cochineal insect, the cochinilla. When synthetic aniline dyes put an end to that in the late 1870s, Arucas went back to cane, and this time to processing it industrially.
This is where the Fábrica de San Pedro opened on 9 August 1884, mainly for sugar and to a lesser extent for cane spirit and rum. The first milling, in 1885, processed 5,619,540 kilograms of cane. The factory was granted the title of Purveyor to the Royal Household by the Queen Regent, María Cristina. The company doesn't give the year; Gran Canaria's tourist board says 1892.
Sources disagree on when the sugar factory became a pure distillery, but the same name appears in all of them. According to Directo al Paladar, a Spanish food magazine, the factory was on the verge of closing in the 1920s, and Alfredo Martín Reyes, the company's head of administration, bought it with partners and turned it into a distillery. According to the Gran Canaria tourist board's blog, he reopened it in 1935, now only for rum. The company's own history mentions the 1940s, when Martín Reyes was already running it, and that is when the name Ron Arehucas was born, "el de las llaves", the one with the keys, after the Saint Peter emblem on the labels. The factory has been called Destilerías Arehucas since 1965. Meanwhile, for much of the 20th century the land around Arucas belonged to the banana, which you can read about in this article.
In its own words, the company keeps one of the largest and oldest rum cellars in Europe, and according to its official website the cellar open to visitors holds 4,700 American oak barrels, some of them signed. The tourist board's blog lists among the signatories Johan Cruyff, Tom Jones, Plácido Domingo, Alfredo Kraus, Montserrat Caballé, Willy Brandt and Anatoly Karpov. We don't know exactly how many signed barrels there are: an undated post on the company's blog says about three hundred, but it still talks about 4,308 barrels, not 4,700. The two figures come from different times.
According to the company, it gets more than 95,000 visitors a year. In 2006 it bought the Fábrica de Licores Artemi, which by its own account made it the largest spirits group in the Canary Islands.
Aldea: ninety years of cane juice
In La Aldea de San Nicolás on Gran Canaria, Manuel Quevedo Alemán, born in 1872, founded the Destilería San Nicolás in 1936 to make Ron Aldea. That makes 2026 the company's ninetieth year, and its website has a separate "90 Aniversario" section.
Quevedo chose to distil the cane juice, the guarapo, directly, even though the company itself writes that this is less profitable and less efficient. The EU regulation only allows the term "agrícola" on rum for the geographical indications of the French overseas departments and Madeira, and the Canary Islands are not among them.
His son, Carmelo Quevedo, moved the distillery to La Palma, to San Andrés y Sauces. According to the company this happened in the mid-1950s; other sources give other years. They still distil the cane juice today, over a hand-regulated wood fire, in the still that Manuel Quevedo had built in 1936.
The cane is grown and cut by hand by La Palma farmers. According to the island's development association, ADER La Palma, there are only 4.3 hectares of cane on the whole island, and almost the entire harvest goes into rum. According to Rumporter, a specialist rum magazine, the distillery is barely a hundred metres from the seawater pools of Charco Azul. Aldea's ronmiel is made from La Palma bee honey and the house white rum, Ron Aldea Blanco.
What we don't know
We don't know when rum was first made in the islands. According to an Arehucas spokesperson, it was certainly being made in the 18th century, just not called rum, and whether it was made earlier is not known. The year 1500 in the specification comes from unnamed literature, and we haven't seen its source.
We don't know what became of the other entry on the 2008 EU list. Next to "Ronmiel de Canarias", plain "Ronmiel" appears on a separate line, also as a Spanish geographical indication. Whether it is still protected today, we couldn't tell from the EU register. Nor do we know who the registered producers of Ronmiel de Canarias are today: the ICCA website has no public list.
The sources give different dates for the royal title, for when Martín Reyes took over and for the year of Aldea's move, and we won't settle that for them.
How it's drunk, and why it matters
Artemi, which belongs to Arehucas, recommends its ronmiel as an aperitif or digestif and, depending on the occasion, with a little cream and cinnamon. Aldea suggests it with semi-hard and hard cheeses, nuts and puff pastry. We wrote about Canary sweets, bienmesabe included, in our article on Canarian food.
If you want to take a bottle home, it's worth reading the label. The name "Ronmiel de Canarias" means it was made in the islands under the rules of the product specification. If the word "selecto" is on it too, then according to the specification the honey is of Canary origin and the rum was made in the Canary Islands as well. And the sweetness can be deceptive: ronmiel contains between 20 and 30 % alcohol. According to a 2020 press release from the Spanish Ministry of Health (Ministerio de Sanidad), "no existe un nivel de consumo seguro", meaning there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.
If a drink has rum in its name and by law isn't rum, what decides what's in the glass: what went into it, or what the paperwork says about it?
Where you can see it
According to the company, a visit to Destilerías Arehucas in Arucas takes about an hour, and it warns that the visitor centre sometimes closes before the end of opening hours because it is full or because of events. Check opening hours and tickets on their official website. Our listing: Destilerías Arehucas. While you're in Arucas, the town has the church of San Juan Bautista, and above it the Montaña de Arucas viewpoint.
On La Palma, Aldea runs the sugar cane and rum interpretation centre (Centro de Interpretación de la Caña del Azúcar y del Ron). You'll find the visiting conditions and booking on their official website.
We've gathered the other sights of the two islands here: What to see in Gran Canaria and What to see in La Palma. You'll find Gran Canaria's museums and restaurants in our guide.
Sources: Gobierno de Canarias, ICCA: the Ronmiel de Canarias product specification (expediente técnico) and the ICCA ronmiel page; BOE, Orden APA/3941/2006 (with the text of the Canary order of 21 September 2005); European Union Regulations 2019/787 and 110/2008 (DOUE); GOV.UK, Defra, Ronmiel de Canarias; J. Márquez Rodríguez, "Oro blanco: la arqueología del azúcar en Canarias" (Teoría y Práctica de la Arqueología Histórica Latinoamericana, 2022); Díaz Hernández and Hernández Padrón, a historical and cultural tour of Arucas (Cliocanarias, University of La Laguna, 2022); G. Trujillo Méndez, dissertation on the equipment of the former Tejina rum plant (University of La Laguna, 2024); Destilerías Arehucas official website (Conócenos, Visítanos, Productos, blog); Turismo de Gran Canaria (Museo y Fábrica del Ron; El templo del ron en Gran Canaria); Destilerías Aldea official website (Historia, Elaboración, Ronmiel, 90 Aniversario, Visítanos); ADER La Palma; Rumporter (2019); Artemi; Directo al Paladar (2024); Ministerio de Sanidad, press release (2020).
Cover photo (cropped): the Destilerías Arehucas distillery seen from Montaña de Arucas, Arucas, Gran Canaria. Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The crop is shared under the same licence.