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 (EUR177.27), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
When a former employee of Spanish Vogue is the host, you can be sure you’re in for a stylish stay, and Hotel Caserío Aldeallana delivers on the fashion front. This hidden-away hacienda is an hour north of Madrid, with hundreds of acres, a courtyard and a chapel on the estate, along with a historic five-bedroom house, all dapperly dressed by one of the country’s most in-demand interior designers. Madrileños in the know can’t get enough – and now you can join Spain’s style set for refined rural weekends, too.
Noon (but you can hang around the house until 2pm). Earliest check-in, 4pm – let the hotel know your ETA the day before.
Prices
Double rooms from £168.23 (€195), including tax at 10 per cent.
More details
Rates usually include breakfast. Two-night minimum stay.
Also
If you like what you smell, you can pick up the finca’s bespoke fragrance in the boutique, which also sells the bathroom tumblers everyone wants to take home, paintings and decorative tissues made by local artists, books by the hotel’s interior designer and souvenir soaps. And if you like what you’ve eaten, sign up for one of Lucia’s monthly cooking classes.
At the hotel
Free WiFi throughout, yoga classes, croquet, table football, rose garden, board games and books, boutique, bicycles to borrow. In rooms: kettle and Nespresso coffee machine, mineral water and vegan bath products.
Our favourite rooms
Based solely on its grand wooden dressing-table-style bathroom sink, room 4 trumps most other vanities; we’re also fans of the pattern-clash triumph of its bed, which pairs tartan and florals. Rooms 1 and 5 have twin beds.
Poolside
The birdsong-soundtracked pool is a few minutes’ walk from the house in the garden, with spectacular surrounding-countryside views, hammocks, a sitting area in the (beer-, wine- and ice-stocked) poolhouse and a vine-shaded area for siestas. It’s open from 11am until 8.30pm during the summer.
Spa
There’s no spa, but treatments can take place by the fireplace in the poolhouse during the winter and in assorted amazing spots throughout the estate in the summer.
Packing tips
One of the daughters may have once been Vogue staff but she’s fully converted to the good life: wax jackets and riding boots are welcome. Madrid may be hot and hectic, but out here it gets cold in the evenings, even in high summer.
Also
The historic house has not been adapted for wheelchair access.
For exclusive-use bookings of the full finca, children are welcome.
Sustainability efforts
Solar panels have been installed, plastic bottles are outlawed and the mineral water comes from the grounds. The food is either grown on the estate or bought from neighbouring farms, and menus are designed in line with what produce is available at the time.
Out on the (most likely) sunny courtyard for breakfast; stake out the red velvet armchair with your book; or shuffle up to the card table.
Dress Code
Country life – but make it fashion.
Hotel restaurant
Paella parties with fairy lights in the trees and whole roasted lamb are the kind of home-cooking events you can expect during the summer, all created by the daughter Lucia, who is the seasonal main chef. At weekends in the warmer months, gazpacho made with ingredients from the garden, two different salads, pies and anchovy toast form the lively family lunches. For dinner, it’s more homegrown salad and soup, meat from about two minutes away and biodynamic wines. The menu is adapted around what guests want, just to make you really feel at home. In winter, guests can either go out for meals at restaurants recommended by the hosts, or request one of the picnic hampers to enjoy in the grounds. Breakfast ingredients are also sourced from either within the farm or negative kilometres, with vegan and gluten-free options available, too – a buffet is laid out in the lounge and guests either eat in the dining room or at tables in the courtyard.
Hotel bar
There’s an honesty bar that guests can access at any time – and the poolhouse is stocked with ice, wine and beer.
Last orders
Breakfast is served between 9am and 11am daily. Mealtimes vary depending on how many guests are staying, but in the summer lunch is usually 1.30pm to 3pm and dinner between 8.30pm and 10pm.
The fashionable farmhouse is in Segovia Province, a short drive from Madrid in the sunny Spanish countryside.
Planes
Land at Madrid-Barajas Airport and the drive north to the hotel should take around an hour. It’s also possible to board a train at this airport bound for Segovia – there are regular direct, 27-minute services.
Trains
Segovia-Guiomar station is within a 20-minute drive of the house – trains from Madrid run every half an hour (journey time: 22 minutes). Taxis are available to take you onwards to the hotel, or you can arrange a hotel transfer for €100.
Automobiles
It’s easy to get to and from Segovia by train, but a car will come in handy for exploring this rural part of Spain – the estate has a free car park hidden away in the grounds (so as not to be unsightly).
Other
Guests have been known to hop in an Uber in Madrid and arrive at the finca within the hour for under €100.
Worth getting out of bed for
There are 740 acres to explore, starring: thousand-year-old oaks, a rose garden, running and walking trails, and animal residents including wild boar, horses and deer. The family can take you on Land Rover tours to meet the doe-eyed neighbours and arrange picnics in the middle of the estate (hampers are helpfully lined up under the stairs) or sunset drives with a magically appearing drinks table. They’ll also be able to guide you to a local whisky distillery, nearby markets and golf courses, and a glass factory – and dispatch their trusty guide to come along with you. Museum-packed Segovia has a Gothic cathedral, Roman aqueduct and mediaeval walls. For regal residences, head to the town of San Ildefonso, home to two palaces: Riofrío and La Granja.
Local restaurants
Many guests arrive armed with a long list of reservations and activities but end up not wanting to leave the finca – if you can bear to drag yourself away, Valdeprados village has a bar in front of its church and two lovely restaurants that have a similar take on seasonal local food to the hotel. In Segovia, Casa Duque has had more than a century to master the Spanish art of (vegetarians, look away now) roasted suckling pig, more of which is available at José María, though be sure to book ahead.
Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this homely hotel in Spain and unpacked their bathroom tumblers and artistic tissues, a full account of their bucolic break will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside Hotel Caserío Aldeallana in Segovia Province…
The family at the helm of Hotel Caserío Aldeallana takes the concept of mi casa es tu casa to new extremes: most guests of this fashionable finca in Spain’s rural Castile and León region end up becoming firm friends and return again and again. It’s just the kind of country home you wish one of your friend’s owned: under an hour from a big city (Madrid), hundreds of acres – with a fountain-like stone pool, a chapel and resident wild boar and deer – to call your own, a relative that’s a fabulous cook and a charming, historic town and royal palaces a short train ride away for when culture calls. The interior designer Isabel López-Quesada is kind of a big deal in Spain (she’s a family friend, naturally) and this is her first hotel – guests travel from all over the country to see what she’s done with the place. Answer: a heavenly hacienda with generational heirlooms in every corner, thoughtful touches like picnic baskets and blankets to borrow, and soft furnishings that fall just the right side of chintz. It’s so stylish that even the activities list was drawn by a Vogue illustrator. It may be their casa, not yours, but at least you can borrow it.
