El Rinconcillo
Grade CSeville, Andalusia
The 1670 foundation is the tavern's own claim, repeated in Wikipedia's list of oldest companies; no primary record was checked and current trading status could not be re-verified online.
5 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The oldest pub in Spain
The short answer
By claim, the oldest drinking house in Spain on this list is El Rinconcillo in Seville, which dates itself to 1670 and rests on no document we have traced. By record it is the Taberna Antonio Sánchez in Madrid: a notice in the Diario Curioso, Erudito, Económico y Comercial of February 1787 announced the premises being transferred as a wine business, and the cadastral survey of 1749 shows the same building with the tavern's space unchanged.
Spain's old drinking houses are easy to find and hard to date, and the reason is that the argument here has always been about kitchens. The world's oldest restaurant is a Madrid title, contested between two houses, and that contest turns on when food was first cooked rather than when wine was first poured. Four of the five houses on this page are counters. Two are Madrid tabernas, rooms with a metal or stone bar, a vermouth tap and a till older than anyone in them, where the drink comes first and the kitchen is behind it. Two are Andalusian: a tiled tapas tavern by the church of Santa Catalina in Seville where the waiters still chalk your bill onto the wood, and a bodega by the cathedral whose back room keeps the clay tinajas the wine was once aged in. The pattern that decides the grades is this: a Spanish house of this kind usually begins as a shop selling wine — by the skin, by the litre, out of the barrel — and becomes a place to drink gradually, without a date. Where that is what the claimed year records, we say so and leave the house out of the ranking, which is what has happened to the oldest bodega here.
Two Madrid counters and two Andalusian bodegas
Taberna Antonio Sánchez in Lavapiés has never been refitted: a tin bar, gas lamps left where they were, bulls’ heads on the walls and a till more than a century old. It took its present name in 1884, from an owner whose accounts differ — a Valdepeñas wine merchant in one telling, the father of the bullfighter of the same name in another. Casa Alberto on Calle de las Huertas is the other Madrid room, and the vermouth is why people go: an onyx counter, a font of five taps, a seltz saturator and a nineteenth-century till, all of it arranged by Alberto de Dios when he took the business on in 1924. El Rinconcillo and Casa Morales are the Seville pair, five minutes and two hundred years of trade apart, and both are drunk standing.
The oldest-restaurant argument, and why it is not this one
Madrid holds the Guinness record for the oldest restaurant in the world, at Sobrino de Botín, founded in 1725 on Calle de Cuchilleros. Since 2025 it has been publicly contested by Casa Pedro out in Fuencarral, which claims 1702, has employed a historian, and told the Spanish press it has documents that put the business twenty-two years ahead. It is a good argument and it is not ours. Both claims are about a kitchen and a posada — a roadside inn with beds — and this site asks when drink was sold over a counter, which is a different question with a different answer. Casa Pedro has a page on this site and Botín does not, and the difference is the counter rather than the claim. The Academia Madrileña de Gastronomía describes Casa Pedro working before the 1950s with a big counter and one small room for a dining room, and a Madrid paper found a bar still inside its door in February 2026, which is enough to call it a house that sells drink across a counter; nothing comparable has been published about Botín, which is why Botín stays a lead. What is still unanswered at Casa Pedro is whether a walk-in is poured a glass there without eating, and that question sits on its page in those words. Its 1702 is a family date: the earliest written trace of the house that either it or the city can produce is 1825, the earlier papers being said to have been lost in the Civil War. So it is graded C and out of the ranking, page or no page.
Where Spain sits in the wider list
Five houses is thin for a country with a taberna on every second corner, and the gaps are whole cities: Barcelona, Granada, Valencia, Bilbao and the sherry towns are unworked here. For the nearest comparison, a wine country whose oldest rooms are also counters where you stand, see the oldest pubs in Italy; for the Spanish-speaking counter across the Atlantic, Mexico and Argentina. For how a claim is weighed against a record on this site, read the methodology; the full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.
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The contenders, oldest claim first
Claims 1670; no early record found. Casa Pedro
Grade CMadrid, Community of Madrid
The 1702 is the family's own, and the paper that would carry it is said to have been lost in the Civil War. Two Madrid accounts put the first written record a century and a quarter later: the City of Madrid's tourism service says the house was founded in 1702 "although it is not documented until 1825", and the Academia Madrileña de Gastronomía says the first written evidence of Casa Pedro's existence is from 1825
Claims 1702; first recorded 1825. Taberna Antonio Sánchez
Grade AMadrid, Community of Madrid
The year comes from research rather than from the house: the historian Antonio Pasies dated the tavern to 1787 in a book published in 2018, and the City of Madrid's tourism service sets out how. It says the exact founding date is not known but that the house is older than February 1787, when the Diario Curioso, Erudito, Económico y Comercial announced that the premises were being transferred as a wine business, and
Locally dated 1787; first recorded 1787. Casa Alberto
Grade CMadrid, Community of Madrid
The 1827 is the house's own and the city repeats it. Casa Alberto's history page gives the year and says a plaque at the door, put up by Madrid city council, carries it; the city's own tourism service prints the same date. Neither points at a licence, a deed or a directory entry, and none was traced, so the year is a claim with a municipal plaque behind it rather than a record. The house's own account of a
Claims 1827; no early record found. Casa Morales
Grade CSeville, Andalusia
The 1850 is the house's own — "fundada en 1.850" on its website — and Seville publishers repeat it without a document behind it. They name the founder as Leocadio Morales Prieto, who already owned bodegas in Valdepeñas and opened this one to sell their wine in Seville; no licence, deed or directory entry was traced, so the year is a claim. What those accounts also make clear is what the year dates. The business
Claims 1850; no early record found.
The photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits. A pub with no licensed photograph shows an illustrated façade instead.
Common questions
- Which is the oldest bar in Spain?
- On records we can cite, the Taberna Antonio Sánchez in Madrid, which a newspaper notice of February 1787 already found trading in wine at Mesón de Paredes 13. El Rinconcillo in Seville claims an earlier year, 1670, and says so on its own walls; we have traced no licence, deed or directory entry behind it, so it is graded C.
- Is Sobrino de Botín on this list?
- Not yet, and for the site's first question rather than its dates. Guinness recognises it as the world's oldest restaurant, which is a fact about its kitchen, and nothing published that we have found says whether a drink is served at its bar without a meal. Its 1725 also dates a posada rather than a counter. It stays a lead.
- What is the difference between a taberna and a bodega?
- A taberna is a room built around a bar, and in Madrid usually around a vermouth tap. A bodega began as the place the wine was kept and sold, and turned into somewhere to drink it later. Both are taverns in our categories; the difference shows up in the grade, because a bodega's founding year often dates a shop.
- Why is Casa Morales out of the ranking?
- Because its 1850 dates a wine shop. The sources that supply the year say Leocadio Morales Prieto opened it to sell wine in bulk from his Valdepeñas bodegas, that drinking on the premises began gradually afterwards, and that no food was cooked there until about 2000. With no year for that change, it keeps its page and leaves the ranking.