Located in the Debub Gondar Zone of the Amhara Region, east of Lake Tana and south of Addis Zemen, this town has a latitude and longitude of 11°55′N 37°42′E / 11.917°N 37.700°E / 11.917; 37.700 with an elevation of 1828 meters above sea level.

Wereta appears in the Royal chronicles during the first reign of Emperor Tekle Giyorgis (1779-1784), as the place whence Ras Hailu Eshte fled after escaping imprisonment in Gondar.

[1] Wereta was included as one of the stages of the Gondar-Boso trade route of the 1840s, located immediately south of the Reb River, according to a list compiled by Antoine Thomson d'Abbadie in his Geodesie d'Ethiopie.

In the 1990s, a new campus for the Wereta College of Agriculture was designed by National Consultants (chief architect Assefa Bekele), with a proposed budget of 60 million Birr.

Based on figures from the Central Statistical Agency in 2005, Wereta has an estimated total population of 26,317, of whom 13,044 were males and 13,273 were females.