Cookery Course & Holiday Overview
Discover the true taste of Spain – authentic cuisine and culture in the mountains of Andalucia

With our Spanish Cooking Holidays we offer you a new way to discover Spain. If you love to cook, or would like to learn about cooking, if you enjoy feasting on the fresh tastes of Mediterranean cuisine and relaxing in the Southern Spanish sun: then come and join us on our culinary adventures in Andalucia.

Our chefs will teach you to cook dishes from all over Spain, from gourmet specialities to the simplest of recipes. Famous dishes are included, such as gazpachos and paellas which we prepare outdoors over an open fire. We also include many regional specialities, from the rich and hearty broths of Galicia to the delicate Ajo Blanco garlic soup from Malaga; from the robust cazuelas of beans and pork, or lamb slow-roasted for seven hours, to the most delicate of flavours such as marinated oranges in rosemary honey.

Our ingredients come glowingly fresh from the markets of Malaga, Granada and the mountain villages. In the spring and summer we forage for wild herbs in the mountains and in the autumn we go to the woods to gather sweet chestnuts and wild mushrooms for our kitchen.

These vacations offer a full programme of cultural and culinary excursions as well as cooking classes: we sample Andalucia’s gastronomic specialities at the village bodegas and in Granada; we visit local vineyards and discuss wines with the winemakers; we take picnics to the river and visit the famous white villages of the Alpujarras; and we spend a day in Granada at the Alhambra palace followed by a relaxing soak in the Arabic baths and shopping opportunities in the Moroccan quarter of the city.

We hope you will have a rich and unforgettable new experience of Spain, its culture and its gastronomic treasures.

Accommodation
We stay at Casa Ana, a 400-year old private house in the Alpujarra mountains of Andalucia. There you will find stylish and comfortable accommodation, a fabulous country-style kitchen for our cooking classes, and terraces with stunning mountain scenery — the perfect setting for preparing paella, grilled fish and other culinary delights. More information on the house and its facilities is available on this site.

In between cookery classes and excursions, there will be time to enjoy being at Casa Ana, with its secluded cottage garden and superb views of the Trevelez river gorge. You can wander out to the spring to collect pure mountain water, or have a look round the tiny, unspoilt village of Ferreirola, or write your postcards on the terrace, or do nothing at all but listen to the distant sound of goatbells and the river.

Food and comfort are important to us at Casa Ana. Very important. We love food. We love the ingredients of this area, the fresh figs and almonds and the tangy cheeses and the local wines. As far as possible our cooks use local produce and vegetables grown on the land near the house. We can cater for those who eat meat, those who only eat fish, and for full vegetarians.

And the comfort. At Casa Ana everything is as pleasurable as we can possibly make it. The bedrooms, the dining room and the group room are all white walled with terracotta tiled floors and dark wood doors and windows made by local craftsmen.

The guest rooms have comfortable beds in stylish rooms with beamed ceilings and traditional tiled bathrooms with high pressure rain showers. Thick walls keep the rooms cool in summer and in winter they are heated with under floor heating. For writers there are rooms with writing desks.

Team:
Our team came together to run these Spanish cooking holidays because we share a passion for Spanish cuisine and culture and a love of the Spanish countryside:

• Kim Schiffer, a chef with a passion for local, seasonal and organic foods who has cooked in Italy, Morocco and California, and has now realised her dream of running cooking vacations in Spain;
• Francisco Lillo, chef, gourmet and raconteur from Cordoba who now runs Granada’s most famous delicatessen, La Oliva;
• Julio Donat who has devoted his life to the study of the local flora and the their culinary and medicinal uses;
• Anne Hunt, a former festival director in London who in 2002 made the leap to go and live in Spain. There she stumbled on a derelict, 400-year old house in the Alpujarras and transformed it into a beautiful centre for mountain retreats.

Location
Las Alpujarras is a stunningly beautiful mountain area on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada range in Andalucia. It is situated about 90 minutes drive south from the historic city of Granada, and the same distance north of the Mediterranean sea.

To explore the Alpujarras is to step back in time. For many centuries the area was populated by the Moors who left their mark on the landscape: everywhere you look there are terraced fields, mediaeval mule paths and an incredibly sophisticated, hand-constructed irrigation system with hundreds of kilometres of water channels (acequias) and tiny reservoirs (alberquas). For a thousand years these have provided water from the high sierras to every village and every meadow, almond grove and vegetable garden in the area. This system is still in use today.

The Alpujarras is famous for its white villages, clinging precariously to the mountainsides. This too shows the legacy of the Moors: the jumbles of flat-roofed, rammed earth dwellings are not seen anywhere else in Spain but closely resemble the building style of the Atlas mountains of Morocco.

For anyone who enjoys walking, horseback riding or mountain biking, the Alpujarras is a paradise of winding paths and stunning views. It is also renowned for the abundant variety of its flora and fauna - the Sierra Nevada is home to more than 2,100 plant species, over 80 of them unique, and many rare species of butterflies, insects, and birds. At certain times of the year you can see 65 - 70 different species of butterfly in a week.

How to Get to Us
By air: You can fly to Malaga airport (2.5 hours away) at an appointed time and we will collect you from the airport. Many budget airlines operate daily direct flights including Easyjet, Bmibaby, Flybe, British Airways, Ibera and many others. Or you can fly to Granada airport with Ryanair (1.5 hours drive away) and make your own way to Casa Ana. Buses, car hire and taxis are available.
We'll be glad to help you with information and advice about travelling to Casa Ana.