Cortijo el Esparragal

Currently El Esparragal is a modern agricultural and cattle farm with 3,000 hectares of land. The main building has been transformed into a small hotel with 21 rooms, various meeting rooms and dining rooms of varying capacities. The cattle farm has 1,000 milk cows with a daily production of 12,000 liters of milk as well as calves for feeding, 400 Retinto cows producing 100,000 kg of meat per year, 180 animals sold for reproduction to other farms and 30 pure Spanish breed mares which have won numerous prizes in prestigious stock fairs. The history of El Esparragal dates back to the Tartessian times, back to the Bronze Age, as the ruins of CastrejÏ?n attest. In the Roman times it acquired great relevance as it was a part of Italica and was crossed from north to south by the road that linked this town with Emerita Augusta. Some remains of this Roman road still survive, such as walls and baths, which are found close to the fountain still in use in the CastrejÏ?n. In the fifteenth century, during the reign of John II after the conquest of Spain, the king bestows its jurisdiction on Fernando Medina, whose heirs sell it to the Order of Jerome in the seventeenth century. This order was established in a convent, which together with its chapel devoted to the Virgin of Bethlehem, constitute the foundations of the current buildings, where they worked the land, baked bread in their mills and looked after the meadows. After the sale of Churchâ??s lands in Spain, El Esparragal has different owners, until in 1951, the Vasquez family takes charge of it and builds a farmhouse attached to the monastery. In 1967 the Marquis and Marchioness of Casa Oriol purchase the farmhouse to which they add two more estates, and build a reservoir which allows irrigation to 600 of the 3,000 hectares of El Esparragal. Due to mechanization of the countryside and new market methods for the farming products, the majority of the facilities of the old building -mills, stables, warehouses, etc- cease to be useful and for this reason in 1991 the Oriol-Ybarra family decides to transform the former farming facilities into bedrooms, living rooms and dining rooms for hotel use, but always maintaining the original architecture of the building. The most relevant agricultural productions are olives -both the table and the oil variety-, oranges -with a recent plantation of 200 hectares-, fodder corn and irrigation fields which allow us to be almost self-sufficient in feeding our live stock a variety of wheat, sunflowers and chickpeas. Moreover, El Esparragal has 900 hectares of Mediterranean forest with a great variety of fauna and flora devoted to big and small game hunting of boars, deer, partridge, ducks and rabbits. The El Esparragal farmhouse is a historical building which dates back to the year 1615, when it was a convent of the Jerome Order. In 1992 the building was reformed maintaining its original architecture but not renouncing to the comforts of a modern hotel. All the rooms and common spaces are carefully decorated with antiques gathered throughout the long history of the building.