Our story

Kai and Katri are Finnish, and they have lived in Spain since 2009. Kai is half-Spanish and spent part of his childhood here, so the country has always been a second home rather than a discovery. He had been out of contact with the Spanish side of his family for more than thirty-five years. He has since found them again.

The finca was Kai’s idea and Katri’s phone call. He had found an advertisement for a place above Alforja and asked her to ring the agent, whose first question was whether she understood what she was getting into: it was on a hill, she said, with a very steep drive. In Katri’s own words, “I told her I’d driven plenty of mountain roads and wasn’t worried.”

She went to see it alone. The agent had her park at the bottom of the track and drove her up herself, which is still the most honest review that last stretch has ever had. Something settled early: the stone, the way the house sits into the hillside, how quiet it was. She came back with Kai in the middle of a grey winter and they both knew. They looked at other places out of due diligence. Nothing else came close.

The house came later, around 2015. It was overgrown and in poor shape when they took it on, rigged for summer weekends and not much more than that. They bought it as a summer base and a trail-running hub, and it turned into their home for years.

It had no bathroom and no shower. Faced with building one or the other first, they built the sauna — “of course we chose the sauna” — and showered outdoors, all year, for the next three. Years of work followed, and most of the spaces that make the place what it is were added across them.

Living there full time was never the plan. The house was habitable from the start and meant to be a weekend base, somewhere inland to drive to when the mountains were the point of the weekend. It became the plan anyway.

What Katri notices, still, every time she is there, is the quiet. “Most days the only sound is birdsong.” After years near the coast she describes that silence as its own kind of luxury: the city, as she puts it, just falls away.

Morfi and Tiku were adopted for a country-house job: keeping the mice down. Most of the family’s life has moved elsewhere since, and the cats stayed. Katri’s own line on it is that they “have the most expensive cat house ever built”.

Kai has been an outdoors person all his life, and a trail and mountain ultrarunner since the move; the routes in the running guide are his own. He is a SCUBA instructor, he is learning to kitesurf, and he flies paragliders — which he took up for a reason particular to this valley. The ridge directly opposite the house, above the old quarry, is an active flying site. On a summer day with the right weather, people take off from the top and land down in the village, and it happens often enough that you stop noticing.

His work is demanding, and both of them work remotely, so the house has always had to be somewhere to work as well as somewhere to stop. The quiet is the reason it succeeds at both.

Friends and visitors came, and kept falling in love with the place. Their son, who works in the Lapland travel scene, spent years arguing that the cabin should be shared with people beyond the people who already knew it, and helped set it up when they finally agreed. Their daughter — an ultrarunner, divemaster and paraglider, and by her father’s account “a younger female copy of me” — takes the same view.

Most of the family’s life is elsewhere now, which is what changed. Selling has come up and been closed down flatly, by both children, who are adults and come back every chance they get, and by Kai, who reckons that leaving a place like this unused “would be criminal”.

Before any of it was offered to strangers, the house had already been doing this for years. Katri has hosted more parties there than she can count, and a wedding. Word travelled among friends and among Finns in Barcelona until the place became, in her words, “something of a legend to visit”.

People who stay tend to come back. She puts the sauna at the centre of that — the cherry on the cake, in her phrase — and says she has lost count of the number of guests who have told her it is the best sauna they have ever been in.

That history is what a guest is actually booking into, and Kai puts it better than a description would: because it was “never built to be a rental, but rather a place that we ourselves would love it has a ton of character. It is not an easy place to maintain, has its rough edges, but it usually always touches something in every visitors soul.”

The rough edges on this site are described rather than apologised for, and that is why.

Katri’s own hope for whoever books it is the last word, because nothing written here improves on it: “I hope our old home gives you the same peaceful, unique experience it’s given so many people over the years.”