One family’s dedication brought a crumbling cortijo back from the brink of disaster to become a thriving business

South of Seville the road to Jerez bisects the great fertile plains of Andalucía, where rotating crops of cotton, wheat and sunflowers paint ever-changing colours across a table-flat landscape – issuing continually from a canvass of rich, burnt-umber soil.

Here, tucked away in a shallow knoll beneath the spirit-level horizon is a hidden treasure, screened from view until the last moment by a long drive flanked with tall banks of oleander bushes. The drive opens suddenly to reveal the front of a building with a façade as broadly flat and impressive as the surrounding countryside.

This is the Hacienda de San Raphael, an immaculately restored ‘cortijo’, the Spanish term for a grand country farmhouse that sits within its own estate. Hacienda de San Raphael is a breathtaking example of such a property. Built in the 18th century the Hacienda was originally used for pressing and storing olive oil from the groves across the 350 acres of accompanying farmland that encircle the property.

In 1989, Tim and Kuky Reid set out to rescue the Hacienda before it fell into a state of terminal decline. The property had been in Kuky’s side of the family for 150 years, and she and her husband Tim realised that although they had a chance to create a beautiful new family home as well as a potentially great business prospect here, the window of opportunity for doing so was closing fast. They set themselves to the task, and three years later the building was transformed into a magnificent and stylish family home.

The white buttresses of the house’s metre-thick walls are covered with swathes of jasmine and blue-flowered plumbago, and stepping through one enters a breathtaking courtyard flanked by two arched, covered walkways spilling bougainvillea down their walls.

The courtyard has been re-laid in the traditional patchwork pattern of cobble and brick, with ‘1993’ by the central well, serving as an excellent indication of the level of care, authentic craftsmanship and all-round dedication that has been lavished on this old house over the last eighteen years.
The surrounding grounds have had no less attention paid to them. Old, sickening olive trees have been replaced with a thousand new specimens. A battle against the parching climate has been fought and won over the five acres of land immediately surrounding the Hacienda, now meticulously landscaped into a series of adjoining gardens flourishing with flowering herbs and citrus trees, making it feel as if you have stumbled into the kind of oasis more commonly found across the Mediterranean in North Africa.

For the couple’s three children, Vanessa, Anthony and Patrick, free time and holidays spent out here were an integral part of childhood, and as they grew up they not only became fluent in Spanish but also, when Hacienda de San Raphael opened its doors in 1993 as one of Spain’s very first small-scale boutique hotels, became vital contributors to the ongoing maintenance and refurbishment of this grand property.

Read the full story in our April 2008 issue.