Region & History

Drive through Arandas today and you'll mostly see agave fields and dairy pastures. Both have shaped this corner of Jalisco for a long time. The town itself traces back to four families who settled on land belonging to the Hacienda Santa Ana Apacueco: the Aranda, Camarena, Hernández Gamiño and Hernández Rull families. The land once belonged to the Marqués de Altamira. Over the centuries, the great colonial haciendas broke up into smaller ranchos, many of which remain in family hands to this day.

This rancho structure is exactly what sets Los Altos apart from the lower valley around the town of Tequila, where larger estates dominated the landscape. Here, distilling was often a sideline, squeezed in between cattle ranching and agave farming. The Camarena family was already distilling agave spirit in the early 19th century. During the Mexican Revolution, their distillery was destroyed and abandoned.

Don Felipe Camarena Hernández, a grandson of that generation, initially sold agave only to other distilleries. On 7 July 1937, he founded his own distillery near Arandas: La Alteña. From 1940, he sold pure agave tequila under the name "Tequila Tapatío". The El Tesoro brand followed later. His grandson Carlos Camarena still runs the distillery today, using similar methods.

In 1974, Mexico officially declared Tequila a protected designation of origin. From then on, 181 municipalities were permitted to use the name, including Arandas, Atotonilco el Alto, Jesús María and Tepatitlán. Only spirits distilled from blue Weber agave within this territory may be called Tequila. Above all, that protection means one thing: it applies equally to the family operation and the global conglomerate.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Atotonilco el Alto. There, Julio González founded his distillery La Primavera in 1942 at just seventeen years old; it later became the Don Julio brand. And there, from 2002, the Patrón brand—founded in 1989—built its own new facility: the Hacienda Patrón. Before that, its spirit had been distilled at neighbouring Siete Leguas. In Los Altos, long-established family businesses and international brands often sit just a few kilometres apart.