Over 12000 years ago in Europe and the Middle East the first herds of aurochs. To heat the milk produced by these extinct bovine, leather bags were filled with the liquid and put over preheated stones. Occasionally, the milk became a paste that separated from the liquid residue resulting to be edible. Little by little, this accidental 'discovery' was mastered in order to produce the paste in a controlled way, improving the quality of the resulting product. The most important archaeological discovery in dairy history may be the Sumerian frieze (about 5000 years old) in Baghdad’s National Museum of Irak, which represents the phases of animal milking and milk curing. However in 2003 was announced that chemical analysis of 6000-year-old pottery shards shows ancient Britons also had a taste for cow's milk and goat's cheese, becoming the oldest proof yet of chees consumption.

Cheese became popular in Greece and Rome. Later, cheese production expanded throughout Europe, and in the Middle Ages its consumption was generalized, mostly in monasteries, where the production for some of the best known cheeses of today began. 

The word "cheese" comes from the Latin "caseus", which probably means carere suerum, that is, 'without serum', and that is the origin for the name of this product in Spanish (queso), Portuguese (queijo), English (cheese), Dutch (kaas) or Germans (käse), as well as gazta o gasna en Basque, queixo in Galician, or quesu in Asturias. The terms in French (fromage), Italian (formaggi~fromage) or Catalan (formatge) have two theories for its origin, both referring to the mold shape. One says that it comes from the Greek "formos", which was the wicker pot used to drain the serum from the cheese. Another tells that somewhere in today’s France the term caseus formaticus began to be used to name a cheese made in a mold. Later the adjective became a noun, and the term for cheese in France, Occitaine, northern Italy and Catalonia. From the Catalan or the French this expression also became a Spanish word, 'formaje' that the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language includes in the dictionary to name the mold or shape used to make cheese.

Shepherds where probably the group that generalized the cheese production traditions, since cheese was one of the easiest products to get during the long summer months with the herds; the cheese was made using the milk obtained from February to August. Seasonal pilgrimages by the shepherds during the Middle Ages helped to propagate different cheeses throughout the Iberian Peninsula. In the pilgrims’ road to Santiago the cheese from Aragon, Navarra, Castile, Cantabria, Asturias and Galicia gave the pilgrims a great source of energy for their journeys. In the beginning, the cheeses were made domestically, for private consumption, but slowly new cheese production industries developed to help us enjoy a great variety of cheeses, many of them keeping the traditional production processes that save the product' s original strength.