A couple of years ago, we went on holiday by mistake. Desperate for sun and "family fun", we chose Cala Galdana in Menorca, a place I'd been to with my own parents way back in 1973. I remembered it as a promised land of pedaloes, Guantanamera and endless iced chocolate milk. Thirty-five years later, it had lost much of its appeal. It was wall-to-wall pizza, crazy golf and long karaoke sessions late into the evening, the strains of Mamma Mia! lulling us into a fretful sleep in our hot-box apartment each night. My husband hated it with a passion. By day four we weren't talking. By day six there were tears – and not just from the kids. I don't think there was a day seven.
Two summers on, when I suggest Spain again, it goes down like a brick. But this is different, I chirrup. A finca! In the middle of nowhere! Hold me back, says my husband, but he agrees to the trip, chiefly because it sounds ridiculously romantic – Finca el Moro, a remote 70-acre farm in the Sierra de Aracena, close to the Portuguese border and far from the dreaded Costas.
We fly to Málaga (idiotically, it turns out; Seville is much closer) and our first test is to find the finca, a place truly located somewhere between nowhere and the middle of it. Our sheet of directions into the unknown is delightfully vague: "Go past the gate with the blanket on it . . ." it says. "Be brave!" By now it's past midnight and the roads are becoming tracks, the tracks becoming trails and the trails petering out into the scrub. "What," asks my husband, "if they've moved the blanket?" At last, we arrive, the children wide-eyed with exhaustion. Nick Tudor has stayed up to greet us, and we know at once we're in good hands. Within minutes, we're asleep in one of his cottages.
We wake to find ourselves installed in Chestnut Cottage, with its pool overlooking olive groves and flanked by sweet chestnut, holm oak and cork. The chestnut harvest used to be dried in the eaves of our bedroom, and Nick still hangs his precious hams from the rafters every season, and ripens melons and pumpkins under the bed.
Nick is a zoologist who studied elephants in the Serengeti and farmed langoustines on the west coast of Scotland before falling in love with El Moro more than 20 years ago. With his wife Hermione, he found the spot – a rich plain of wild flowers and red-bellied cork trees – after a six-month search, riding and camping until they discovered their dream. The main 18th-century farmhouse, a former winery, was a wreck, so they lived in tents, showering in the trees, reclaiming the land, rescuing the farm from bramble and forest. Two decades later, they still have a little encampment of six cotton bell tents for yoga holidays (complete with wooden floors, compost loo, solar electricity in each tent and solar-powered showers). The three cottages, meanwhile, are simply furnished, with stone floors and whitewashed walls, cloaked in jasmine and cool in the heat.
Within a day of arriving, we find that we don't want to move far. We'd rather stay put, freshly shucked of the hassles of home, warm and lazy and longing to swap lives with the Tudors. We amble each morning to the couple's little farm shop, accompanied by Nuha and Squirrel, the farm's resident mastiffs. The shop is not much more than a bench, a shelf and an ancient chiller cabinet – but we load up on fat tomatoes, pork loins, home-bottled spiced pears and syrupy little figs. They sell orange mushrooms too, and dense, woody sausages. Pretty much all you need for a feast.
The mornings start to get later and later, so that we're just about ready to eat breakfast by lunchtime. This, you feel, is the life. The finca, it turns out, has precisely everything you want from a family holiday – at least once the kids are old and wise enough to amuse themselves and fend for themselves a bit, kids who want to be within sight but not glued to your side. There's no TV here and no Wi-Fi – which means you can while away an entire afternoon perfecting your silliest dive or playing Go Fish, endlessly, with a pack of dog-eared cards. You soon find yourself rather busy, the hours slipping away like honey off a spoon. Our children – aged six and seven – turn feral and tangled and dusty, like their surroundings; they spend mornings in a sunlit hammock reading Winnie the Pooh, accompanied by carpenter bees and swallow butterflies. They set off on afternoon sorties to a rickety tree house 500m away, armed with a bottle of Coca-Cola to share, and stay there, shoeless and contented, catching cicadas for pets. There are stables to visit, home to Hermione's dozen or so high-stepping Andalucían horses, plus impromptu stretching sessions in the yoga hut, built on the farm's old threshing circle. You can go horse-riding if you're up to it. (Clients are accepted or refused on the basis of riding ability. "The necessary requirement," they say, "is being good enough in the saddle to match the horse beneath.")
The lifestyle envy pales somewhat when you notice how the Tudors work endlessly on their farm – Nick bringing barrowfuls of peaches back from the fruit patch, Hermione collecting fallen figs to feed her horses. It's hard graft, even though, at 600m above sea-level, this area is temperate and far more forgiving than the coast. (Seville can be 10 degrees hotter, though it's only an hour away.)
One morning, invigorated by the absolute thrill of idleness, we decide to set off with a donkey to see what we can see, following what the Tudors describe as "a walk of about an hour to Nowhere In Particular". We amble off on a lazy nature trail, following the droveways used as smuggling trails during the Spanish civil war (when Andalucía was known simply as el hambre, the hunger). The kids sit aboard Violetta, our donkey, singing hits from Oliver! and hopping off every so often to collect acorns, quartz and huge pinecones. Later, Nick arrives at our door with a plate of his own jamón. (It turns out he's a vegetarian – probably the only vegetarian butcher for miles – and a teetotaller too, though he's more than happy to pour glasses of the local fino sherry, ice-cold from the fridge.)
The following day, inspired by our jaunt, we press further afield, walking with Violetta along dusty caminos lined with lavender and blackberries to the sun-baked hub of Fuenteheridos – a small, whitewashed town with a central plaza, a handful of bars and tapas joints, random dogs and ladies sitting in the shade. We park the donkey and go shopping. No souvenirs or laminated tourist menus. No pizza. No Spanglish pubs or karaoke nights. There are, however, tales of local lynx and wild boar in the forest. There are chameleons and orchids and gentle hills ideal for hiking.
On our last night, Nick fires up the barbecue (in an old wheelbarrow), and produces a memorable meal of tiny, tasty lamb chops, dainty to hold and suck, accompanied by radishes, tomatoes, aubergines, laughter. We watch shooting stars, pointing out the Plough, Cassiopeia and the North Star to our sticky-fingered, happy-hearted kids. Menorca is a world away, and it's no surprise that the Tudors have a 60% return rate. Once you've found it, you'll return. But not before we do, I hope.
