La Donaira

You see the house long before you reach it. A white Andalusian farmhouse sits halfway up the hillside, low and long, with a dirt road unspooling towards it through dry grass and holm oaks. Behind it the Serranía de Ronda folds away in blue ridges, one paler than the next.

La Donaira is a working farm, a Lusitano stud and a hotel of nine rooms, in roughly that order of importance to the land. It covers 700 hectares between the provinces of Málaga and Cádiz, a short drive from the Route of the White Villages, in one of the most biodiverse corners of Europe. The cortijo stands at 850 metres, and the estate climbs to 1,121 metres at its highest point, the Pico Malaver. Some of the holm oaks on the estate are thought to be 900 years old. Birds of prey nest on the rocky peaks. There are traces of six ancient civilisations nearby, including dolmens and the Roman theatre at Acinipo.

The idea behind it is simple to state and slow to build: that animals, nature and people can share a place on equal terms, and that a guest can feel the difference. It is the first property in Spain to be featured on LuxuryStayWorld.

The main house is more than a century old. It was built as a shed for cows and horses, and the restoration kept its bones: whitewashed pillars left soft and uneven, ceilings of rough timber and cane, walls of stacked fieldstone. Where the stone opens, it opens wide. Picture windows frame the valley like paintings, and the outdoor and indoor rooms run into each other through big wooden doors.

Inside, deep leather sofas sit low between the pillars, with stacks of books and armfuls of cut flowers from the garden. A grand piano waits in a corner of the main living room. Breakfast is laid out on a terrace under a vine, and in the evening the long tables move inside, beside the open kitchen.

There are only nine places to sleep, and each has its own name and its own character. In the stone suites, bare fieldstone meets walls washed in earth tones, antique writing desks, sheepskins on the floor and contemporary prints above the bed. Some have copper bathtubs. Others look straight out over the olive groves.

Two of the nine are yurts, set apart on a rise among the oaks. Inside they are all white canvas and gauze, with a canopied bed, a carved stone basin and a tin bath, and a terrace that faces the open valley.

• Priam · MagnoliaGrand Deluxe Suites
• Ana & Adrian · Laura · SofíaDeluxe Suites
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Almost everything on the table starts on the farm. The biointensive vegetable gardens supply all the vegetables and salad leaves the kitchen uses. Goats and cows give the milk that becomes ricotta, yoghurt and butter each morning. There are free-range eggs, honey from the estate's own hives, olive oil pressed from its own trees, and sourdough baked daily. The lamb and beef come from the herds that graze the hills, including the rare native Pajuna cattle.

Chefs Nerea Ortiz de Urbina and Manuel Vargas write the menu around what was picked that morning. The cooking is simple on purpose, served on vintage china, and dinner tends to run long. All meals and drinks are included in the stay. The cellar holds more than 350 natural, biodynamic and organic wines from across Europe, and the estate grows its own Petit Verdot and Blaufränkisch. Sommelier Borja Dura looks after the cellar, and will happily pour a tasting under an old oak or inside the greenhouse.

Beyond the kitchen garden lies the medicinal garden, modelled on the herb gardens of old monasteries. More than 300 healing and aromatic plants grow there. They go into infusions, into dishes and into the spa's treatments, and their flowers fill the house. The garden also shelters a bee bed, one of only four in the world, where you lie above a living hive and let the hum of the colony settle you.

The Andalusian donkey has worked this landscape for some three thousand years and is now at risk of extinction. La Donaira keeps a small herd and calls them the estate's mindfulness masters. You can walk the trails beside them, listening to birdsong and the steady fall of hooves, or join a session of shinrin yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, with a donkey for company. Children tend to go home having made a friend.

There is plenty more to fill a day, or to leave undone. Trails run through the oak woods to panoramic hilltops, with a pocket map in every room. There is archery in the forest, aerial yoga on a platform over the valley, sound baths with gongs and Tibetan bowls, and workshops in soap-making and kombucha. Most guests do one or two things a day and spend the rest of it doing nothing at all.

The outdoor pool is fed by a mountain spring and edged with wild planting, so it reads more like a pond than a hotel pool. Indoors, the spa is dark and quiet. A 21-metre lap pool runs the length of a stone hall towards a window full of oaks, and there is a steam bath, a wood-fired sauna with a glass wall onto the rocks, and an ice-cold plunge. Treatments use the estate's own ingredients, such as lavender and fresh goat's milk, or herbs cut that morning from the medicinal garden.