Region & History

Mahón, known in Catalan as Maó, sits on one of the deepest natural harbors in Europe. This very harbor shaped the island's history: whoever held it controlled the trade routes of the western Mediterranean. In the 18th century, several powers wanted exactly that.

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 confirmed what British troops had already occupied since 1708: Menorca belonged to the British Crown. With some interruptions, this remained true until 1802, when the Treaty of Amiens finally returned the island to Spain. For nearly a century, British sailors and soldiers anchored in the port of Mahón.

They brought their gin with them, and the Menorcans soon began distilling their own. Enough juniper grew on the island to distill a spirit of its own, modeled on what the occupiers drank. Out of this encounter grew a distilling tradition that survives to this day, while nowhere else in the Balearics did a comparable gin emerge.

In 1945, Miguel Pons Justo founded the Xoriguer distillery in the port of Mahón, drawing on an 18th-century recipe. The name comes from an old mill called Xoriguer, which had once supported the family. Since then, the Pons family has run the business generation after generation, right on the quay.

Today, Xoriguer is the only distillery permitted to produce Gin de Mahón, protected by a European designation of origin. Walk through the streets of Mahón, and you'll smell the copper of the stills before you even see the distillery.