Hotel Xereca

Beside the pool at Hotel Xereca stands a nineteenth-century windmill, restored and fitted out as a shower and a treatment room. We had a couples massage inside it. It is as good an example as any of what we came away calling the hotel's understated cool: an old building given a new job, and no fuss made about it.

The farm is still there. Xereca sits on about 50,000 square metres of orange and lemon groves in Puig d'en Valls, and Estudio Vila 13, Jordi Carreño's practice, turned the estate's finca into a hotel in 2016, with nineteen rooms on two floors. It has five stars, and we thought it luxury of the quiet kind.

Ours was a Garden Double, and it was huge, the bathroom too. It had a seating area at the front, and at the back a garden with a shower in it. In July it is hard to think of a reason to shower indoors.

The hotel's own idea of a morning is a yoga class, which it arranges through Awa Yoga, followed by breakfast among the orange trees. We thought breakfast outstanding, and guests single it out in their reviews too, though a couple found the choice limited or the price high. The pool is on two levels and unheated, which in July is no hardship, and cocktails were brought to us there. Reviewers call the pool and grounds peaceful, and the spa is for adults only. For sand, it is a drive to Talamanca, about three kilometres off, a sheltered bay beside Ibiza's port.

Children are welcome, and the rooms are where it shows: two of the Garden Doubles have a connecting door between them, and the Xereca Suite is offered to couples and families alike. Beyond the rooms nothing is laid on for them, with no kids club and no babysitting. Talamanca is popular with families for its shallow water. Dogs are allowed as well.

In the evening Ibiza Town is five minutes away by car, walled old town and all, and we liked having its restaurants that close. But Ibiza as a whole is short of taxis, Puig d'en Valls included, so Xereca needs a car, which the estate has room to park, or a taxi booked before the first drink rather than after the last.