Just added to our website in early January, 2007, this is a luxury 9 bedroom villa on a huge hilltop property (10 hectaires of forest) located between Barcelona and the Costa Brava, 2.7 kms from Castellterçol village, about 40 kms inland from the beaches. Take a look at the photos of the house, and then if you can, take advantage of the owner´s introductory first-year reduced rates. The rates will go up considerably in the years to come!

• a huge independent self-catering villa (700m2)
• situated on 10 hectaires of protected hilltop forest
• 9 bedrooms and a total of 11 bathrooms, beds for up to 22 guests

• altitude: 750 mtrs, 2 kms to Castellterçol, 40 kms to coast (Mataró area), 40 kms to Barcelona
• central heating, dishwasher, 3 TVs with DVD, 3cd/radio/cassette players, etc...
• outdoor pool (16 x 7 mtrs.) with 16 lounge chairs
• heated indoor pool (3.5 x 7.5)
• current rates for up to 18 guests*: high-season: 6150 Euros per week, mid-season: 5100 Euros/week, low-season: 4300 Euros/week
• *up to 4 more guests permitted (up to 22 max.) for 200 Euros per week supplement

Dating originally from the 17th Century, El Turó (meaning the hilltop in Catalan) is a well-preserved typical Catalan baronial mansion, situated on a very quiet and private location out in the middle of a forrested nature preserve, on an unpaved road out to some medieval shrines. Very generously proportioned, with impressively large living quarters spread out over three floors, El Turó boasts lots of attractive decorative details, like the old terra cotta floors, gorgeous wooden ceiling beams, huge stone door frames - some showing the original medieval inscriptions - all with above-average furnishings.

Location: the once prosperous wool and ice-producing town of Castellterçol has now become a quiet village for well-to-do Barcelonans to keep their quite sumptuous holiday residences. You can tell from the art-nouveau and modernist villas that there´s money in them there hills. (An opera singing friend told me he once gave classes to Vitorrio de Sica´s grandchildren here, as that famous Italian director´s wife was from here, or at least her family had a summer house here.) Castellterçcol town center has some nice old buildings, a shopping street with everything you need on a small old-world scale, from a smattering of stores (small supermarket, butchershop, fishmonger, terraced cafés, restaurants, tapas bars, and even a couple of places to play tennis (see my area info for this in the link above).

Now to a description of the house!

On the first floor: The ground floor consisted of three large 95m2 rooms, like the naves of a church, three rectangles with additional rooms like chapels attached. The massive wooden double front door opens on to the central living room, which as you can see from the photos below, has a distinctive oriental or Middle Eastern flavor, the four large sofas (two seating 6 or 7, two seating 3 or 4), and a large fireplace with Turkish lighting and high wooden ceiling beams complete the atmospherics. A flagstone staircase from this central room leads up to the bedrooms on the second and third floors, and beyond the staircase there is a room with a bar consisting of a bar with bar stools, a card table, a little fridge, a TV, and a nicely lit ancient stone and brick bread oven, just one of the many decorative features that adorn every room of this house! To the right of the central room is the kitchen and to the left the dining room.

The kitchen has a central dining table seating 14 or more next to an indoor BBQ grill and to the far side of the room is the modern kitchen area, with a food prep island in the middle, including a small sink. Around the three sides of the many shelved kitchen are the all German appliances, including SMEG 5 burned gas hob, AEG electric oven and microwave, mini mokka expresso machine, juicer, toaster, etc, etc. The American Whirlpool refridgerator is across the kitchen area, and has one of those water and ice dispensers that I have seen in American movies (but have never used!). Just off the kitchen is the pantry, with a washer and dryer and hand-washing sink, some clothes lines, and there is also a door to the interior patio where Anna, the German caretaker, lives. Anna stays on this side of the house and the rest of the house and garden and pool areas are quite private for you...

The dining room is quite impressive, with a long table seating 20 or more occupying center stage in an otherwise quite bare room with nice modern lighting, some modern paintings on the wall, a huge cupboard of mostly wine glasses to one end of the large room, and the entrance to the indoor pool at the other end of the room. I should mention here that the indoor pool area has a full bathroom, a full designer bathroom with a huge bathtub about the size of a 6-person jacuzzi (not sure what that is for, but like so many things about this villa, the scale is massive, and no costs were spared in its construction! Also on the flagstone stairway up to the bedrooms, there is a WC with only toilet and washbasin, so you have two bathrooms on this ground floor.

From the dining room, you have a door to the back of the house, with that very nice verandah under brick arches with white cushioned whicker L-shaped seating area (about 10 places) around another of those Indian wood sculpted and ivory inlaid tables, and the views out here of the pool below and the Moies valley beyond are just wonderful! There are no other buildings in sight, and the silence would be absolute if it weren´t for the birdsong...

On the second floor: The nicest bedrooms are to be found situated around the attractive central room on the second floor. This large central room has a couple of sofas set around a wide-screened TV and DVD player and fireplace, with a low Indian sculpted table in the middle. Going around the room clockwise, we have the following, all en suite bedrooms:

1) the first room on your right is where I choose to sleep, a large room with a 2x2 meter four posted bed and a odd designer bathroom with another huge circular stucco bathtub

2) next, on the other side of the central room, is the huge masterbedroom, like no bedroom I have seen before! and it occupies the entire annex above the indoor pool and measures about 90m2!, and has many special and unique features, including: a very fancy bathroom with includes a Whirlpool jacuzzi sunken bathtub and a multi-nozzled glass shower stall, direct access to a large terrace overlooking the pool, a fireplace in the middle of the room, direct access to the indoor pool below via circular staircase, a small sitting area with nice leather chairs, two huge wardrobes, a wide screen TV, 7 large windows on three sides of the room, parquet floor, etc, etc. Oh, and as this room has lots of windows and is above the heated indoor pool, it is a bit hot in summer so there are ceiling fans to keep it cool in summer...

3) on the left of the central room, a good-sized red-painted room has a 1.5 x 2 meter bed with iron frame and a large bathroom with bathtub and bidet

4) the middle room here is a medium sized room with 2 single beds and a small orange stucco sculpted designer bathroom with walk-in shower

5) and the last room going counter clockwise has a double bed measuring 1.5x2 meters and larger bathroom with bathtub and toilet and bidet.

Upstairs the third floor bedrooms come as somewhat of a disappointment after the splendor of the second floor rooms. Here´s why:

The central room around which the top-floor bedrooms are situated is attractive and with fireplace but not as comfortable as the central room below. It is set up like an office space, with a lot of bookselves, a nice old desk as in an old-fashioned study, and there is a decorative swing hanging from one of the gorgeous ceiling beams, along with a couple of tables and chairs scattered around the central room... The ceiling beam are just fantastic in this central room but the beams slope through the bedrooms, meaning that you can not stand up in all parts of the four bedrooms on this top floor under quite steeply slopping beams...

On the left of this central room, one door on your right leads into a double bedroom with private bathroom, meaning this one doorway in from the central room opens on to a 6th bedroom with two single beds pushed together, an on each end of this bedroom, there is a door, one leading to another 7th bedroom with a 1.5x2m double bed and a single bed, and the other door leading in to the bathroom, quite a nice bathroom with a bathtub and a separate shower stall. So this set up is not ideal, having to go through one room to get to the next, and from that back room thought the front bedroom to get to the bathroom.

But it is even less ideal on the other side of the central room, where there are also two bedrooms reached from one doorway: the main large 8th bedroom has four single beds, and beyond a little door there is a smallish 9th bedroom with double bed under a skylight, and neither of these two rooms have a toilet, so you would have to go across the hall and into the room there, or down the steps to the second or ground floor to find a toliet there. The owners intend the remedy the bedroom and bathroom situation on the third floor in time for 2008 rentals, and prices will go up accordingly! or perhaps I should say exponentially!

There is a lot more I could say about El Turó. It is a house full of nooks and crannies and lots of little details indoors and out. There is a four car garage and lilly pond out front and there are plenty of walkways around the house and the pool is amongst the largest we have in our catalogue of rental properties and the lawn space around the pool is large enough to kick a ball, although there are some football goal nets over by the empty horse stables, along with some swings, and other kiddy features.

The pool area has about 14 light-weight designer loungechairs and the poolside outdoor BBQ area seats about 10 but additional seating can be added and there is a food prep area and a sink, along with the villa´s 9th bathroom here. There are other features I´m not sure if I should make much of, such as the videocamera security system, with video fed of the remote controlled gate on one of the TV channels, and the owners told me that the entire garden area can be lighted at night, but they don´t want guests to run up huge electricity bills so they are keeping the switches under lock and key, as they have done with the wine celler, which they have turned in to a much needed shortage area. The indoor pool is kept year-round at a water temperature of 29ºC....

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. This place is just incredible!

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