Mr & Mrs Smith

Arriving in any whitewashed Andalucian village, and especially one with deep, dark Moorish roots like Vejer de la Frontera’s, I am always reminded of Laurie Lee, the great writer and traveller who passed this way in the Thirties. For him, it was all about being a pathfinder, a naïf with his life in a handkerchief hanging from a stick. He was invited by crinkly old women in black veils into mazy white alleyways, up marble staircases lined with Andalucian tiles, into houses barred with slender ironwork, roofs open to the sky. He paints a picture of central courtyards full of palms and potted grasses, the food simple, the beer cold, the mediaeval stone walls keeping the interior cool in the hot afternoons.

And that is exactly what you get at Escondrijo on the Costa de la Luz, except that it’s not a crinkly old woman who leads you down the mazy alley to her home, but Tenette Ludlow, who is not crinkly at all. Or possibly her partner, Nigel Anderson, who is only a bit crinkly. They are two British refugees from urban servitude who brought what was once a chapel back from the dead in 2005, and have made it something that, depending on how you look at it, is either a tiny, stunning boutique hotel, or a private home with four rooms set aside for paying guests.

And that is the great thing about it: for as long as you are in Vejer – whether it’s a month or just a night – this is your home. And it’s not some shonky self-catering duplex with a view of the petrol station: it is a dream of the Spanish Golden Age. Travelling can so often be about simply observing a foreign lifestyle and environment, about witnessing historical continuity and low-key exoticism, rather than living it, that you wonder if it is worth doing at all. And then you come somewhere like Escondrijo (which means, I believe, ‘hidden place’), and you know that it is.

We arrived at the village after midnight and parked in a small square where children were running round the tiled fountain and people sat out drinking and eating. We walked up steep, cobbled streets, under alabaster archways, following our written directions past vast wooden doors, until we found the right one and pounded on it.

‘Aha – we thought the plane might be late,’ said Tenette, peering through the slidey spyhole in the door, before opening up. ‘Can I get you a drink? Beer? Or maybe a glass of wine? I’ve no bread but there’s ham and cheese and stuff if you’re hungry.’ Not only prescient and generous, but low-carb, too…

Then we followed her in through the entrance to what would soon become our own little bolthole at the end of our own white alleyway, and up the cool marble steps lined with tiles (our marble steps, our tiles) and through another, more highly polished wooden door, and we were on a four-sided balcony, iron-railed, that looked down to a stone-floored bar and dining area and up to another balcony and then to the sky.

The drama of black wrought iron against white walls looks as attractive inside as it does out in the village streets. But here there are many-coloured tiles, too, restored and relocated, and rich fabrics, and gently pulsing music. Down in the internal courtyard we had our beers and smelt the cool air and the teak oil on the furniture. It was like going to stay with one’s very posh Andalucian friends – except that if it belonged to one’s posh Andalucian friends it would probably still be falling down.

We spent our first two nights in a vast and dazzling room with a hammock on its mezzanine floor, and its own roof terrace with wide views over the dusty plains. We lolled on the many-cushioned chaise longue, and leafed through the home-dec magazines full of nothing as beautiful as the home we were in (such a nice feeling), and enjoyed a minibar full of icy Cruzcampo and cava. Stacked on sills were lots of good books – I sampled Don DeLillo, Banana Yoshimoto and Julio Cortázar. We snuggled down in thick, silky cotton sheets and woke to breakfast on fruit and homemade granola and yoghurt (in less lovely circumstances I have gone for weeks in Spain without seeing fruit or roughage) and then all the jam and sheep’s cheese you can roll onto bread. And great coffee. And proper tea.

When we refused to leave, they hived us away in another bedroom – smaller, nookier, more Moorish still, with a similarly dramatic and exciting bathroom and an elephantine, steaming, rushing shower. We liked the roof beams in the high ceilings, and the ferns that were riffled by breezes through the windows. The suite was horizontally arranged this time, not vertically, and the little bedroom was deep red, with a central bed and wide wooden running boards.

Not that you want to stay in quite all the time. Nigel is a master of maps, and his hastily sketched diagrams directed us not only to lovely local bars and restaurants but to wide, white, windy beaches and sheltered coves not ten minutes away. To Tarifa where hundreds of lunatic kite-surfers fill the sky with their blazing sails. And to ancient Cádiz, a dazzling city climbing back now after years of decline. And to Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson whupped the French in 1805.

There is history, too, in Vejer. First a Phoenician then a Carthaginian then a Roman settlement, it became a Moorish hub, where women of the village (though Christianised these last 500 years) wore the head-to-toe black chador until as recently as the Forties. It wasn’t far from here that Christopher Columbus sailed out down the river Guadalquivir to the sea. He set out to find China and, unfortunately, found a malarial swamp in the Caribbean. Some might say he shouldn’t have bothered. If only he had had somewhere nice to stay, like the Escondrijo, he would probably never have left.