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INTRODUCING CASA POETA
Casa Poeta is a traditional Spanish village farmhouse, extensively remodelled and modernised. It is
located in the midst of the magic triangle of ancient Moorish cities: Córdoba, Granada and Seville.
The house sleeps 8 in four bedrooms (two with double, two with twin beds), all with bathrooms
en-suite. The house has a fully-equipped kitchen, a laundry-room, sitting-room with wood-burning
stove and a study/dining-room. In the garden there is a terrace with awning and a fully private
8m x 4m pool, a shaded open-air eating area with BBQ and a small additional summer kitchen;
there is also a separate sun-terrace and a wood-fired bread oven. Indoors you will find a large
library and extensive art-collection, and WI-FI on all floors.
Casa Poeta (the Old House) is an ancient Andalusian finca, a village farmhouse with its own more
modern separate guest tower (seen on left above) set in a cluster of courtyard gardens where
orange and lemon trees glow between scarlet sevillana roses, sky-blue plumbago, clouds of
purple bougainvillea, and abundant banks of rosemary, thyme, bay, mint and basil. In late
summer the evenings are fragrant with jasmine and the langorous scent of dama de noche.
Not so long ago, at the end of the day, farm animals used to be led in through the double front
door to the stables in the back yard. In those days the upper floor with its typically low roof served
as a granary – a safe haven for grain from hungry Hispanic rodents. There was a midden where
the roses grow vigorously now.
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The Main House at Casa Poeta is the old finca itself, with the roof raised to make two double
bedrooms upstairs, sharing a bathroom through separate doors. Downstairs is a fully modernised
kitchen with fan oven, gas hob, fridge-freezer and a dishwasher. A capacious store-room serves
the kitchen.
An arch leads through from kitchen to sitting-room, with its wood-burning Jøtul stove for winter
evenings. Through another arch is the study, which also doubles as a dining-room during the two
or three months of the year when the evenings are too chilly for dining outside.
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The house is decorated throughout with the gloriously vivid photographs of local Andalusian life
by my late wife Fay Tresilian and my own eclectic collection of 20th century art. (* see note below)
Returning downstairs, French windows lead out onto a patio with a Moroccan tiled table and
awning in the green and silver stripes of Andalucia.
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Across the courtyard in the lower garden lies the pool-house, a former cow-shed now
immaculately rebuilt to hold the filtration machinery for the pool and a fully-equipped laundry.
The 8 x 4 m swimming pool itself is the centrepiece of the upper courtyard garden, with its
covered outdoor eating area and sun-terrace.
The Guest Tower also stands here: two double-bedded rooms, both en-suite with shower-room
and w.c., the lower room in an authentic Moroccan blue giving directly onto the pool, the upper
room a rich Moroccan orange with lovely views across the valley to the village of La Chica Carlota
beyond.
The Tower also has its own small summer kitchen and a separate poolside w.c. Across the pool,
beyond the covered terrace, is the pride of Casa Poeta, the clay bread oven, wood-fired and ideal
for pizzas, bread-making and summer roasts.
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Floor Plans
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Casa Poeta in History
When the Christians under Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the last of the Moorish strongholds,
the province of Granada in 1492, the ‘reyes catolicos’ immediately went back on their promises of
religious tolerance and banished Jews and the remaining Moors from Andalusia. This left the
province without all its most capable intellectuals, bankers, farmers and artisans. Over the
following centuries Andalusia – once the garden of Spain – gradually degenerated into bandit
country. It was stop this slide into chaos that Andalusia was ‘re-colonised’ in the 18th century, by
the building of garrison towns at 25km intervals along the main road from Seville to Cordoba, and
their repopulation by surplus citizenry from North Germany. Our nearby La Carlota was one of
those towns. Las Pinedas was one of the outlying villages cloned from it: the same basic layout of
two parallel streets with a square and a church on its southern side, albeit on a smaller scale. Casa
Poeta, on the South-Eastern corner of the village is one of the original houses of that ancient
street-plan.
About the Owner
Nicholas Tresilian is an art-historian and broadcaster, one of the founders of Classic fm and a
leading presenter for many years. He spends the winters in Oxford and the summers at Casa
Poeta, where his office-library is off the lower garden. He also travels a lot, and this then frees up
Casa Poeta for rental.