Bresneda Artisan dairyBresnedaArtisan dairy
Cheese and butter from natural pasture milk.
Four products: cultured butter, Queso de los Beyos with IGP, Azul del Pontón and Vandiel.
We are a small dairy inside the Picos de Europa National Park, making cheese and butter by hand in the traditional way, bringing back older flavours through skilled hands.
The Beyos gorge
We are in the Picos de Europa, on the way to the Cares. From the north, from Cangas de Onís, you reach Sajambre through the Beyos gorge, which gives our IGP cheese its name; from the south, by climbing from Riaño over the Pontón pass. Our dairy is here, inside the boundaries of the national park.
Read on
The national park and its herds
Life in the Picos de Europa has always depended on the high summer pastures. The shepherds' huts up there allowed them to make cheese in the traditional way, which added to what they earned.
It is a way of life that is disappearing, and one we support wholeheartedly at Bresneda.
Those traditions and ways of making are the basis of how we work.
Mountains of 2,650 metres, fifteen kilometres from the sea
From the summits you can see the Cantabrian Sea. Barely fifteen kilometres separate the rock from the water, and in that span the ground climbs from sea level to the 2,650 metres of Torre de Cerredo. Sailors returning from the Americas sighted these walls before any other land, which is where the name comes from: Picos de Europa.
The chamois rules the top, the only animal that takes on the highest gullies. Below there are beech woods with capercaillie, the wolf crosses the massifs, the bear comes down now and then from the range, and the bearded vulture flies here again after a reintroduction programme.
And between the rock and the woods, the shepherds. Every summer the herds go up to the high pastures and in autumn they come back down, the grass is cut for the winter and cheese is made. Cabrales, Gamonéu, Valdeón and Queso de los Beyos all came out of that way of life.
Declared in 1918, it was the first national park in Spain. Today it covers 67,127 hectares across Asturias, Cantabria and León, and since 2003 it is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Oseja de Sajambre is one of its municipalities: our dairy stands inside the park boundaries, not near them.
Let us keep in touch
For the moment we cannot receive visitors at the dairy. We will say so when that changes.