CORTIJO LAS VIÑAS
Christopher and Ursula Rose, Cortijo Las Viñas, Avenida de la Fuente, Mollina, Antequera, 29532 Málaga
UK Phone 01983 618518. Email to contact at this domain.
After working in Music, Arts and Travel in the fabulous borough of Brixton, London, throughout the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, we hankered after pastures new and better weather so sold up and ran away to Spain. This was back in the year 2001, since when a whole bunch of people from the famous to the infamous seem to have followed in our footsteps
What have we been doing all this time? Well, we arrived in October 2001 and bought this late 19th Century traditional farmhouse or cortijo in December that same year. We'd no sooner moved in than the neighbours invited us round for Christmas Dinner! They have it the night of Christmas Eve here in Spain so there we were, sitting down to a strange meal of traditional Andalucian fare, surrounded by a huge extended family spanning four generations; us with nary a word of Spanish and two dozen of them with not a word of English between them. Fortunately, the Navarros are fine people and Mollina is a wine-making village, so a good time was had by all.
Since then we have completely modernized and renovated the villa and run it as a combination of Boutique Hotel, Tapas Bar, Private Party venue, occasionally at the same time, and now Villa Rental. We've also survived well intentioned but ultimately bad advice, attempted fraud, the great floods of 2002 and 2008 and several other flirtations with disaster! We wouldn't swap it for the world!
We've also become semi-fluent in our own weird blend of proper Spanish and the local Andalucian dialect, which has been of great help to both us and many of the local ex-pats who haven't yet gone native like us!