At the end of the 16th century sugar cane was already being grown in the valleys of the modern day Aragua state, in the north of Venezuela. In 1796 Count Martín Tovar Ponte, signer of the Venezuelan Act of Independence, named the terrain in honor of the “Santa Thereza” patroness. After the property suffered damage caused by the royalists during the War of Independence, a young man of German descent Gustav Julius Vollmer Ribas, grandson of the general José Félix Ribas, bought the property and started to produce the first Venezuelan rum in 1896.