The whole property

Booking the whole property means the main house, the guesthouse and Dragonfly together, with nobody else arriving into the middle of it. What that buys is less about square metres than about how a day here is allowed to run.

Nobody else booked in means the pool is yours at seven in the morning and the sauna does not have to be negotiated. On a property where the best rooms are outdoors, that matters more than it would in a hotel.

Music past eleven is the one thing still arranged in advance, because sound carries a long way up here, and arranging it is straightforward.

It runs the same way most weeks, and the shape is worth understanding before you arrive. Mornings are slow: a long breakfast while people work out what they are doing, which rarely turns out to be one thing. In Kai’s words, there is “so much to do that often people end up having different plans for the day”. The climbers go one way and the runners another, somebody drives out to a bodega in the Priorat, and somebody else never leaves the property at all.

The runners tend to go first. In summer that is the whole point, getting the miles done before the heat arrives, and it costs nothing more than being out of bed, because the trails start where the cement track ends.

Then the day folds back in. Lunch is often the first reconvening rather than dinner, and the afternoon goes quiet; people nap, or read, or sit by the pool and do neither. By early evening everyone is usually back and the property feels occupied again.

This is when the sauna goes on, generally while other people are cooking, and it is the part that surprises first-time guests most. It is not an appointment. “The sauna is something that may just stay on for hours,” as Kai describes it, and people move through it all evening: a spell in the heat, out to eat something, down into the pool, back up again. Nobody runs it as an event. It idles in the background and the pool sits directly below, which is the whole reason the loop works.

The nights go long. Somebody has usually come back from the Priorat with a bottle, and it gets opened while the day is retold: who took the wrong turn, what the water in the Gorgs was like, which climb went badly. Nobody plans that part, and it is the part people describe afterwards.

Anyone who has to work can. Wifi reaches all four buildings, the main house and Dragonfly and the guesthouse and the sauna cabin, so there is always a quiet corner with a real connection. A call at eleven does not cost you the swim at six, which is the practical reason the place suits people whose leave is only partial.

The buildings are spread across three levels rather than stacked into one block: the stone main house, the timber guesthouse, the pool and the sauna above it, and Dragonfly, the glass garden room set right in front of the water. Total elevation across all three levels is only about nine metres, so it reads as more climbing than it is. It is not suitable for wheelchairs, or for anyone with a serious mobility issue, though it is not as severe as a hillside site sounds.

Getting here without a car is possible but not easy. The nearest airports are Reus, about thirty minutes away, and Barcelona, about an hour down the AP-7 without touching the city. The nearest train station is Les Borges del Camp, roughly eight kilometres off, though services are not frequent — most guests drive.

The season changes the emphasis and not much else. In summer the day is organised around the heat: out early, the pool through the afternoon, everything social happening outdoors after the sun drops. In winter it inverts — the walking and the climbing are better, the main house becomes the warm centre in the evenings, and the sauna stops being a nice idea and becomes the reason to be here at all. The pool runs all year either way, which surprises people, and going from the heat straight into cold water in January is the thing repeat guests come back for.

A birthday, a big anniversary, a summer party: the whole property is what people book when the occasion is the point, and it is one of the things this place does best. Three guests stay here officially and there is room for visitors well beyond that by arrangement, which is what makes an occasion work at all — the people staying have their beds, and everyone else comes for the day.

The layout does most of the work. Food happens in the barbecue area and on the terrace, the pool takes the afternoon, and Dragonfly sits directly in front of the pool with its own covered terrace and a table under cover. The sauna runs in the background all evening for anyone who wants it, and the stone garden terraces climb behind the whole thing.

Catering, a DJ and the extra cleaning afterwards can all be organised, which is the difference between a good evening and one somebody spends managing. The booking form asks about it directly, and the answer only needs to be a sentence: more than eight people at once, music after eleven, or any of those services, and it is worth saying so early enough to plan around.

Two cats, Morfi and Tiku, live here all year and treat the whole place as theirs instead of belonging to one building, so you will meet them wherever you end up staying. They are kept out of the guesthouse.