Seville Province, Spain

Hacienda de San Rafael

Price per night from$451.03

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR415.00), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Spanish stately home

Setting

Wild southern ranchland

Hacienda de San Rafael is a peaceful Seville hotel is located in the beautiful countryside between Seville and Jerez and within easy reach of the Costa de la Luz. This traditional hacienda-style boutique hotel has three outside pools, two relaxing bars and a Mediterranean restaurant set in tranquil gardens. Massage and yoga can be arranged on request and a paddle-tennis court is also available.

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

A tapas plate served before dinner and a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil (produced on site)

Facilities

Photos Hacienda de San Rafael facilities

Need to know

Rooms

14, including three casitas.

Check–Out

Noon, but ask for flexibility. There is a shower room for use by guests after check-out. Earliest check-in, 2pm.

Prices

Double rooms from £390.37 (€457), including tax at 10 per cent.

More details

Rates include breakfast.

Hotel closed

From mid-November until 15 March.

At the hotel

Wireless Internet access, CD player. Massage and yoga on request.

Our favourite rooms

Rooms 6 and 8 have high ceilings and are particularly roomy; Rooms 9 and 10 are romantically tucked away in the eaves. The separate casitas offer real privacy: they're hidden from the main house and share a private pool and garden, and each casita has its own outdoor area for dining or lounging.

Poolside

There are three outdoor pools. Lunch is usually served by the garden pool.

Also

A picnic can be arranged for €25. The hotel has a paddle-tennis court and boules set.

Children

The hotel welcomes children, but there are few family extras.

Food and Drink

Photos Hacienda de San Rafael food and drink

Top Table

Outside in the gardens.

Dress Code

Relaxed and informal.

Hotel restaurant

The indoor dining room is used in cooler weather; otherwise, dinner is served outside. The three-course Mediterranean set menu for dinner is €55 a person, including wine; however, the chefs will happily tweak dishes to meet dietary requirements, and there are lighter offerings. The fish kebabs and the creamy blue cheese and spinach soufflé are delicious.

Hotel bar

Luna Bar is outdoors, with music and white comfy cushions to lounge on. The Sunset Bar is next to the pool.

Room service

8.30am–midnight. There are phones for room service in the casitas.

Location

Photos Hacienda de San Rafael location
Address
Hacienda de San Rafael
Carretera N-IV (Km 594) Las Cabezas de San Juan
Seville Province
41730
Spain

Planes

The nearest airports are Jerez and Seville (San Pablo), both 45 minutes away by road. Grab a taxi or hire a car at the airport.

Trains

Santa Justa station, in the centre of Seville, offers high-speed links to Madrid and Córdoba, as well as connections with Granada and Cadiz.

Automobiles

One of the hotel’s specialities is organising bespoke excursions within a 45-minute drive, but to explore the area yourself, you’ll need your own car. Hire one from the airport, and park for free at the hotel. If you're driving to the hotel for the first time, make sure to get full directions before you depart – the Hacienda isn't easily visible from the road. (It's 200 metres past the 'zona de servicio' sign before the Respol petrol station at Cruce de Las Cabezas, and the entrance is opposite the small Madisma building. Look out for the two white posts and a line of olive trees leading to the house.)

Worth getting out of bed for

The hotel can arrange a staggering array of activities with local experts: tours of local bodegas; wine tasting; bike tours; bird watching in Doñana National Park; guided walks in the Grazalema Natural Park; half-day cookery classes with a published chef; excursions to the Sierra de Aracena; tapas tours; private city guides; photography courses; sailing trips; game fishing; kite surfing; surfing; tickets to equestrian ballet; visits to a stud farm; countryside treks. Day trips to Seville, Jerez or Cadiz are possible and trips to the historic city of Ronda and the White Villages.

Local restaurants

Up in the mountains, Mesón el Tabanco in the village of El Bosque (+34 956 716 081) does excellent game dishes in a rustic setting. Egaña Oriza on Calle San Fernando in Seville is one of the city’s finest restaurants, serving Andalucian and Basque cuisine. Also in Jerez, La Tasca on Calle Paraíso (+34 956 31 03 40) has delicious fish and shellfish. The stew is particularly good.

Local cafés

Bar Juanito on Pescadería Vieja in Jerez is one of the city’s best tapas bars, with more than 50 dishes.

Reviews

Photos Hacienda de San Rafael reviews
Alex Proud

Anonymous review

By Alex Proud, Proud gallerist

Mrs Smith and I are cruising in eerie silence along the flatlands between Seville and Jerez. She’s brought her TomTom (the satnav system that cabbies swear by) and, thanks to Darth Vader telling us where to go, we haven’t argued once. It’s bliss, even if Vader does lend a rather surreal air to proceedings. We hang a left, down a long, dusty path that appears to be going nowhere. The setting is idyllic – you know the scene: rolling fields of sunflowers, cotton, olive trees, waving wheat… And in the warm evening light (the honey-drenched time that film-makers call the magic hour), it’s like cruising into a Van Gogh. We swoosh past hedges of pink and white oleander, and the Hacienda de San Rafael smacks into view.

A gleaming-white, cortijo-style country house, with foot-thick walls and huge shuttered windows, the Hacienda offers grandeur without a whiff of ostentation. Two sweet-mannered Englishwomen meet us at the doorway, whisk away our bags and offer lemon iced tea. We follow them through the doorway – and past a tangle of cerise and orange bougainvillea – to a terracotta-paved courtyard. Butterflies dance around the flowers and evening birdsong fills the air. The owners are milling around and pop over for a chat. It doesn’t feel much like a hotel: it’s more like visiting a well-to-do friend’s private residence.

The Hacienda has been in the Reid family for a century and a half and, up until the Sixties, it was a working olive farm. The youngest generation, twentysomething Anthony and Patrick, run the place. They are responsible for its recent stylish makeover: blending the languorous sensuality of Spanish bullfighting country with Europhile sophistication. Mum Kuky is from nearby Jerez, and it was her dream to turn the family farm into a small guesthouse in keeping with the surrounding white villages. Her husband, Tim, worked as a hotelier with Mandarin Oriental before setting up the superbly luxurious Datai hotel in Langkawi, Malaysia. Patrick used to be a project manager at the Groucho Club in London, and Anthony organised swish safaris in Botswana. Between them, this family have all the skills to challenge any top resort – no wonder they got it so right here.

We are escorted into the communal living room, which contains a wild mix of upper-crust European and Far Eastern antiques that hints at the family’s travels. Mrs Smith, a keen reader of interior-design magazines, loves it, and throws herself down on a huge red Thai elephant sofa, before hopping up again to inspect the antique iron bull statues on the mantelpiece, and Mrs Reid’s father’s 80-year-old stirrups, which hang in a line above the fireplace. Hacienda San Rafael is a trove of fascinating treasures, and most of them have a story behind them – just get Anthony talking about his grandfather, a ‘horseman and a gentleman’ who won Jerez’s annual Horseman of Gold award too many times to keep count of.

We are staying in a casita, a meticulously converted farm building with a thatched roof, away from the main house. It’s expensive, but we do get a private terrace and infinity pool in a lovingly tended cottage garden. The main pool is spectacular, with manicured lawn, huge day beds and palm-trees for shade – it’s just that Mrs Smith and I have developed a taste for privacy.

The family’s attention to detail is what distinguishes the Haçienda de San Rafael from so many other retreats. Not only is it stunning, but there are three pools, and a full complement of staff to cater to your every whim, too. The dining experience illustrates this well. Mrs Smith is a vegetarian who likes neither eggs nor mushrooms, so eating out in Spain has previously been a pain in the posterior. There is no problem here, though, thanks to head chef Mark Dillon who whips up pumpkin and sage risotto, barbecued tofu kebabs and a delicious baked-aubergine concoction.

The food in the communal dining area is a highlight, and with the nearest café a 20-minute cab ride away, lunchtime tapas and lazy alfresco dinners at the hotel work fabulously. In fact, we spent days experiencing no urge to leave the Haçienda and its grounds, until suddenly we decided we really ought to venture out. So we trekked to Seville’s mighty 15th-century cathedral, second only in size to St Paul’s in Rome, and to the nearby Alcázar Palace and gardens – and the tapas bars in between – all well worth leaving our luxury cocoon for. Mrs Smith was so taken by the Mudéjar architecture, stuccoed patios and intricate mosaic that she had to buy an extra memory card for her camera.

For the more energetic holidaymakers, the hotel can arrange pretty much any activity. As keen riders, we were delighted to meet Cuko, Mrs Reid’s cousin and a family member with yet more hospitality credentials, who owns a private estate with 12 horses a short drive away. His morning rides through the Andalucian mountains, and picnics in the dappled light of local chestnut forests, are hard to beat. For those times when you are feeling intrepid, there’s much to do in and around the hotel: bustling Seville is a hop away; nearby Jerez has beautiful beaches and is the sherry capital of the world; and Andalucía has a long equestrian and bullfighting history.

Having found this slice of paradise, though, you’d be forgiven for just flopping by the pool and ordering a martini and a massage. Just ask Mrs Smith – she became quite the expert at this by the end of our three-day sojourn. And I can’t say I was too bad at following her lead.

This boutique hotel was reviewed by Alex Proud

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Price per night from $451.03