The charming town in Andalusia that deserves more attention

Times

3 days ago

It's hard to set foot in the Plaza de España in Vejer de la Frontera without a sense of expectation. Allow me to draw back the curtain. Greeting you at the heart of the plaza is an ornamental fountain — tiles, finials, lanterns, the lot — fed by four ceramic frogs. Around it, seats with more colourful tiling and wrought-iron backs are shaded by tall, slender palms. There's chatter from café customers and optimistic sparrows, orange trees and bougainvillea adding fragrance and colour, and a sweep of cobbles leading round past the whitewashed buildings in front of the town hall and up a ramp to a medieval archway. In other words, it is a perfect stage set, and the fact I have yet to witness any Vejeriegos breaking into a spontaneous chorus or serenading the crowd from a balcony must only, I feel sure, be down to bad timing on my part.
But then Vejer, near the Atlantic southwestern coast of Spain, does have a habit of playing tricks with visitors' expectations. When a 24-year-old James Stuart rolled into this hilltop Andalusian town in 1980 in his VW Beetle, he was hoping only for a cheap base for himself and his surfboard, handy for the Costa de la Luz breakers a few miles away. Bread and milk were still delivered by donkey then and the Moorish old town was becoming run-down and abandoned as residents moved into newer houses. Stuart found an old building on the plaza that had been on the market for four years and snapped it up for £1,000. Forty-five years on that old building is the heart of La Casa del Califa, one of five hotels he owns in Vejer and nearby, along with a local holiday-home rental service, five restaurants and a hammam — all kept busy by the steady stream of visitors here for the charms of a place that he helped to put on the map. Padstow has Rick Stein; Vejer has James Stuart.
Well, sort of. As empire-building goes it's been more organic than strategic. 'It became a lifelong project without that being the plan,' he says. 'Now I can't leave it. I can't sell it — it's my life.' After Stuart moved in, he worked as a guide, taking visitors on bicycle tours of this lesser-known region, before turning his home into a B&B. He managed to buy adjoining properties — some in ruins — and eventually, in 2001, transformed the collection of medieval buildings into the 21-room Casa del Califa, which soon earned its reputation as one of Andalusia's most charming boutique hotels. Two of its sister properties are neighbours: the quieter eight-room Las Palmeras opened in 2015, the only hotel in town with a swimming pool; the swisher Plaza 18 opened its six 19th-century rooms in 2020. Like a patient older sibling, La Casa del Califa has had to wait for Stuart's full attention, and it finally came last year, in the form of a top-to-toe makeover, its first in 25 years.
'I was never able to invest a lot — the hotel grew little by little — so it became a bit of a jumble,' Stuart says. 'Now we've tried to refine it, making everything more sumptuous, more cohesive.' That's easier said than done in a hotel made up of buildings from the 10th to the 16th centuries; it takes me a few days and a few wrong turns to make sense of the narrow staircases, connecting hallways, surprising courtyards and ancient archways. It's hotel design by way of MC Escher and Lewis Carroll. You think you've entered at the ground floor but, because Vejer stands on a hill, much of the hotel is downstairs — apart from the rooms that are upstairs, of course. 'The hardest thing has been the plumbing,' Stuart says. There are bedrooms in what were once stables, and restaurant tables in former water cisterns and grain silos. 'I've never changed the volume of the spaces, just adapted them.'
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It's his interior designer wife, Ellie Cormie, who can take credit for the updated decor. Gone are the desks and harder surfaces; in their place are linens, velvets and brocades draped over easy chairs, antique wall hangings and headboards. The strong Moroccan influence remains, especially in the fittings and artwork — unsurprising given that Morocco lies just across the Strait of Gibraltar. It is also evident in the popular Jardin del Califa restaurant, with its menu of pastilla pie and rice-and-beef maqluba, patio seating and new hanging gardens. But Africa and the Levant are well represented too, in photos, rugs and artefacts collected by Stuart's father during his time in Botswana, Syria and beyond. 'The caliphate of Damascus was the original one that sent tribes along the North African coastline to reach here,' Stuart says. Hence the hotel name.
Among the antiques and saturated colours are paler fabrics, exposed stone walls and fun, fronded lampshades. In the Africa suite under the eaves — which I share with my husband and son (it was once Stuart's family apartment) — there's an old steamer trunk, bentwood armchairs upholstered with patterned hide, large rugs on the terracotta floor and framed black-and-white portraits of African people. Through the windows on one side we catch wafts of conversation, smoke and the tinkling fountains of Plaza de España; on the other side we can see all the way to Africa, the Atlas mountains shimmering in the distance.
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Alongside its lovely new interiors, what Casa del Califa has always had is phenomenal views. Stuart's favourite room is No 12, a relatively modest double with a tasselled canopy over the bed, lots of windows and direct access to one of the hotel's panoramic terraces. You might think that a hilltop town would have views coming out its ears, but Moorish settlements like this were built more for protection from enemies and the elements than for panoramas and public viewpoints. Step through La Casa del Califa's front door, however, and look out the other side — from bedrooms, terraces and especially the rooftop tea-and-cocktail joint La Teteria del Califa — and you realise that you've landed one of the best seats in the town's natural amphitheatre. Royal-icing-white houses step sedately down the slope, their rosy dawn blush becoming a shades-on dazzle by noon. Below the town are rice fields, marshes and grazing retinto cattle; beyond them the oak-draped Sierra de los Alcornocales, the sea and another continent. It's not unlike Santorini in terms of spectacle — just without the eye-watering prices and queues of selfie-seekers.
Not that streetside Vejer is short on eye candy. We have the Plaza de España for starters, but for mains and pud we get stuck in to the delicious tangle of medieval streets — glimpses of leafy patios through open doors; little independent boutiques and galleries; café tables on ramparts or in the shadow of the mosque-turned-church; a 15th-century castle with its Moorish arches and tropical gardens. Sure, it's touristy, and Airbnb has ruffled feathers here as it has elsewhere, but most visitors are Spanish and the tourism seems well managed. There are parallels with hippyish Tarifa, southeast along the coast, and Chefchaouen, the Moroccan mountain town with which Vejer is twinned, but Vejer is the boho sophisticate of the three — the place for grown-up hippies.
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Strolls and cerveza stops and low-key sightseeing make Vejer the sort of place where it's easy to lose track of time. But we make sure that we keep our appointment at the hammam. Moorish Vejer didn't have one, but Stuart opened his where one would have been, near the mosque, and Cormie has decorated it with artisan wood and brasswork from Marrakesh. In the pleasingly dark and echoey space we dunk our way round the pools — from tepid to hot, to soap and salt scrub in the steam room, to a gaspingly cold plunge under a star-punctured dome. A sweet mint tea for the road and we're drifting back out into the street, feeling as zen as only grown-up hippies can — especially ones who've dried their cossies in the possibly-not-artisan spinny machine.
On a previous visit to Vejer, in October 2019, we ventured out of town for surf lessons at El Palmar, a 20-minute drive away, and to explore the installations by Turrell, Eliasson and Abramovic at Fundacion NMAC, the brilliant pine forest sculpture park ten minutes' drive away. We visited Barbate — not because it was Franco's favourite seaside spot, but for its El Campero restaurant, which does masterful things with every part of a tuna — I still remember the exquisite fatty gill. Next time maybe we'll bring our walking boots for the trails around Vejer or sign up for a foodie tour with Annie B — like Stuart, a Scot adopted by the town as one of its own. This time we combine history with swimming and sandcastles by the dunes on Cape Trafalgar.
And one evening we join a walking tour of Vejer with Juan Jose Ruiz. It's in Spanish, but he gives us an English-language pamphlet and recaps for us along the way, so we get the gist. He leads the group through the old town, taking us to courtyards and corners we might otherwise have missed, regaling us with ancient tales of thieves, ghosts, star-crossed lovers and the mysterious cobijadas — emblematic women of the 16th-century town who showed just one eye from behind a black veil. But every walking tour needs a twist, and Ruiz's is that he performs his as a walking minstrel, complete with a hooded cape, little leather bootees and a guitar to accompany his sung stories. It's … unconventional, but somehow it works.
So it's not strictly true that I've never seen a Vejeriego burst into song. And it's not just Plaza de España — all the town's a stage.
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Liz Edwards was a guest of the Califa Group, which has B&B doubles at La Casa del Califa from £108, mains at El Jardin del Califa from £12 and at Califa Tapas from £9 and 90-minute hammam sessions from £35pp (califavejer.com). She was also a guest of Vueling, which flies to Malaga from £39 (vueling.com), and Marimantas Vejer, which has walking tours from £10 (marimantasvejer.com)
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