This Spanish cheese just sold for a world-record €37,500 after secret bidding pact

For six years, one Asturian restaurant walked away with Spain’s most coveted wheel of blue cheese almost unchallenged. This year, four small businesses that had spent years trying to win teamed up in secret, and their combined bid pushed the world’s priciest cheese to a record €37,500.

Four business owners kept their pact secret until the hammer fell

The winning wheel of Cabrales was auctioned off on Sunday August 30 in Arenas de Cabrales, Asturias, as the closing act of the 54th Cabrales Cheese Competition. Bidding opened at €5,000 among eight hospitality businesses from Asturias and Madrid, climbing steadily through the afternoon. It ended with four of those businesses combining forces: La Montera Picona in Gijón, and three Madrid establishments, Sidrería La Cuenca, Carlos Tartiere and Lo de Viole. None of the four had revealed the arrangement before the gavel fell. “We had agreed among the four of us, who have been trying for several years, to get the cheese and split it between Madrid and Asturias so everyone could enjoy it,” said Alejandra Vanegas of La Montera Picona. Juan Carlos Rubios of Carlos Tartiere added that the goal was “to promote Asturias and showcase both our product and the rural system.”

Six-time champion barely put up a fight 

The result marks a shift at an auction one restaurant had dominated for years. El Llagar de Colloto in Oviedo, run by Iván Suárez, had won six of the previous editions, including last year’s then-record €37,000 sale. This year, Suárez’s restaurant placed a single bid of around €27,000 before dropping out, leaving the field open to the four-way alliance. 

Why a round of cheese can outprice a small car 

Cabrales has held Protected Designation of Origin status since 1981. It is a handcrafted blue cheese made from raw cow’s milk, sometimes blended with sheep’s or goat’s milk, and matured for at least two months in the natural caves of the Peaks of Europe mountains, where it develops its distinctive blue-green veining from naturally occurring penicillium moulds. Only 18 dairies are certified to produce it, turning out roughly 400,000 kilograms between them last year, around a quarter of which is exported. The scarcity, the setting and the theatre of the annual auction, more a local festival than a trade sale, are what push a single wheel of cheese so far above regular prices.

As many people in Spain will know, Cabrales is not the only Spanish product turned into a competition. The country also holds annual competitions for the best Iberian ham in the world, 

The winning wheel spent nine months maturing in a mountain cave 

This year’s prize-winning cheese, weighing just over two kilograms, came from the Ángel Díaz Herrero dairy in the village of Tielve, matured for nine months before judges picked it from 14 entries. It was the same producer’s third consecutive win. 

The contest itself dates back to September 1968, when it was founded by Francisco Arenas Álvarez and José Carrera de Caso to promote the cheese beyond the villages where it is made. It is now held every year on the last Sunday of August and doubles as a local festival, with music, dancing and market stalls in Arenas de Cabrales. 

This year’s price earns it’s place in the record books

The previous record, a €36,000 sale in 2024, was later confirmed by Guinness World Records as the most expensive cheese ever sold at auction. That record lasted less than a year before being broken again in 2025 at €37,000, and now again this year at €37,500, with formal recognition of the new figure to follow soon after the event.

For now, the four restaurants that won it are focused on getting it onto plates. Vanegas and her fellow buyers plan to split the wheel between their dining rooms in Gijón and Madrid, so customers at both ends of the country get a taste of the cheese that broke the record.