Spain’s Finca La Donaira Is Reinventing The Luxury Hotel In Andalusia

Here are some things that Finca La Donaira does not have: televisions, a reception desk, a restaurant, a bar, a concierge, a paved road in front of it, room keys, any sort of dress code, luxury-brand lotions and shampoos, designer linens, tasting menus, symmetry, and shiny objects.

Here’s what the small hotel—for lack of a better word—in southern Spain does have: functional beauty, nine utterly dreamy guest rooms, a close connection with nature, a freeform approach to hospitality, an outstanding equestrian program, all sorts of farm animals, a natural swimming pool fed by a mountain spring, a pervasive tranquility, permaculture that does not reek of hippie-dom, the soft amber glow of the Andalusian sun, and the confidence of a place that knows the rules well enough to break them.

Even though its management came through Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton, La Donaira doesn’t tick many of the five-star-hotel boxes. Forget stars (except maybe the star-carpet of the night) and forget boxes. A beautiful anarchy prevails.

The stone stairways that connect the levels of the gardens don’t align. Wildflowers pop through organized shrubbery. Prime real estate is given to a medicinal garden with some 300 plant species next to the main house. Virtually nothing came out of the traditional hospitality world.

Rather—as these projects often are—La Donaira is the fully realized vision of one creative spirit. Austrian tech entrepreneur Manfred Bodner bought the 544-acre estate in 2005. (Subsequent land purchases have brought it closer to 1,500 acres.) He had come to Spain on business a couple of years earlier and found his childhood passion for horses reawakened by the lively equestrian culture.

He also saw in the estate, on the rolling hills of the Serranía de Ronda, an ecological canvas on which to reflect his family’s (and country’s) tradition of holistic living. He felt that Western societies’ relationship with the biosphere was generally broken, and he had some ideas about fixing that.

“Maybe we could create a beautiful place, in the middle of this pristine nature, where we explore all imaginable forms of human interaction with the rest of the biosphere,” reads the hotel literature. “Through animal experiences, through food, through our permacultural experiments or simply through being…. So we kicked it off with our practical research into alternative agriculture methods. Based on the permaculture and agroecology principles, focusing on soil fertility and biodiversity. Following with ecoluxury tourism.”

As for that ecoluxury tourism, the house is a timeless fusion of styles and traditions, a confabulation that’s somehow both fully Spanish and completely unlike anything else. When Bodner and crew found it, the main building—el cortijo, the farmhouse—was a near-ruin, with the roof partly collapsed, the walls crumbling and a complete lack of infrastructure with no piping, plumbing or cabling. It wasn’t connected to the electrical grid.

This gave them the freedom to build a utopia that reflects the spirit of Andalusian village design. In their eyes, this is a lack of design, in which function trumps form, and there’s no representative façade architecture in service of symmetrical beauty. As they say, it’s “anarchic, but nevertheless comes together as a whole in [an] organic manner like a beehive.” The designers concocted a building that draws no attention to itself as “architecture” and instead feels like an organic outgrowth of nature and history.

They also chose to use the “most radically possible bio construction principles,” such as choosing stone from the UNESCO World Heritage limestone quarries in Moron de la Frontera rather than concrete, using the rocks of the farm’s grounds to remake the house’s walls, and fabricating bricks out of air-dried earth. If the humans all disappeared, it would collapse and leave nothing behind—a sort of architectural permaculture.

I could nerd out more about the traditional and ecological construction—the local chestnut wood, the reclaimed Serbian pine, the massive stone floor slabs, the cork insulation on the roof installed by a Uruguayan hidalgo, the hemp ropes, the five-inch-thick lime plaster insulation put in by a German builder living in Portugal, the lack of screws and nails(!), the passive-house ventilation concept, the double-glazed windows with argon gas in their chambers—but that starts to miss the point of just how kooky and tranquil La Donaira can be.

Of course, defining that point proves difficult when the place’s ineffable qualities defy verbiage. “The website doesn’t do it justice,” is the best some guests can offer when asked about their impressions. There’s the scale and the sounds and the scents, to be sure, but also the fact that the place is not at all self-conscious, seemingly unaware of its hard-to-pin-down seductiveness.

General manager Ronald Jacobs confirms this. “A high number of guests are walking around speechless,” he says. “It touches you on a different level.”

It’s completely unlike anything else in Andalucia, he explains. “Our competition is not the Costa del Sol but a ranch in Patagonia or Montana, or a tented camp in Africa”—that experience, that vastness, that grandeur, that elemental simplicity. (And yes, even though it’s run more like a nonprofit than a hotel, they do care about competition, hoping to attract enough clients to fund an operation with some 90 employees.)

“Our guest is a high-end traveler looking for generosity,” says Jacobs, who managed brand-name hotels in Milan and California. “Generosity of time, of space, of attention. Big hotels have a hard time matching that. It’s just math.” La Donaira’s is “a more fulfilling kind of hospitality.”

The art and design also play a role, he says. “It reminds us that we are still part of today. It’s not completely in the past” but there’s an “emotional feeling” and a sense that it’s a “retreat from the ways we’ve lost our way in modern life. We see how life can be very different.”

And that’s how I ended up spending two nights in a dreamy cocoon of a duplex room, with an exposed boulder in the corner of the living room floor next to a furry white butterfly chair, a floating staircase of wooden slats and wrought iron, a red velvet loveseat and a mosquito-netted meringue of a bed on the upper floor. One artwork looked like a deer head made of pressed flowers, and another like a naked lady wearing a Devo hat. It didn’t seem to have a theme, yet everything was in harmony.

Of course, all that serendipity came from some rigor, following the “process” that Bodner and crew followed, in which they let the house “accept” or “reject” certain elements by leaving them on tables or floors in the construction site until they “got spat out—mostly minutes.” When fancy European bath fixtures felt too weak, they opted instead for industrial fittings made in the US. They rejected the sleek “Milano jacket” leather samples for the modular furnishings in the community area and pushed the Italian fabricator to work with a thick, rough leather used for blacksmith aprons and rustic Spanish saddlery, even though it just barely passed through the sewing machines and the atelier made them sign a waiver.

There are dozens of other examples, like the 100% ecological mattresses with natural latex and coco fibers at the core, wrapped up in Welsh sheep’s wool, and special toppers made of horse hair swaddled in cashmere and organic cotton; downs from Austria and organic linens from Portugal; the eclectic collection of international contemporary art; and the collection of vintage furniture (14th century to modern) sourced during the design team’s travels to Madrid, Bordeaux, Brussels, Antwerp, Vienna and beyond.

I’m doing it again: talking about furniture rather than feeling. But another element that makes La Donaira feel less like a hotel and more like a timeless retreat is the fact that everything is on display. There is no back of house. Jacobs sometimes works in a glass-walled cabin near the swimming pool, but other staff set up their laptops on the mezzanine. The kitchen brigade does their prep and cleaning in a workspace that’s as open as a home kitchen would be. This leads to a calm informality and authentic interactions, yet there seems to be little chance that a guest could end up thirsty or hungry before anyone checks on them. There’s an intuitive taking-care-of.

Perhaps that’s why a plate of chorizo shows up when guests arrive, along with cheese, bread, honey and olives, all of it produced on-site. A bit of the wine comes from the property’s vineyards, with the rest of it organic and biodynamic bottles from the owner’s friends, but housemade kombucha is also on offer.

Proper meals are served on the terrace, around the community area and in the kitchen, which was custom-made from 19th-century factory equipment: legs of cast iron machine parts, a surface of leather drive belts that have thousands of kilometers of use on them, making them equally soft and firm to the touch. The cooking is homestyle and sharable, with an emphasis on the local: vegetables and salad greens from the gardens, eggs and milk from the chickens and goats, and proteins from the lambs, cows and chickens.

It's the kind of food that could change a vegetarian’s mind (or not—no one’s forcing anything). Jacobs didn’t eat meat for most of his life, but he started here, after seeing how animals are raised—“it’s not the cow; it’s the how,” he says—and the importance that livestock plays in regenerative agriculture. Here as well, La Donaira has a thoughtful complexity that belies its freeform hospitality.