He fell in love with a vineyard and ended up buying a town by accident. This is the story of the chef from Tarragona, Alba Ortiz Nin, who after studying hospitality at the Escola d’Hoteleria i Turisme de Cambrils and working in the kitchens of prestigious restaurants in the Basque Country (among them the three-starred Arzumendi), decided to return to Catalonia to start your own project.
The vineyards and the landscape of La Figuera (Lleida) seduced her to the point that it didn’t take long for her to decide to make her own wine there, without backing down from the idea of ​​having to live in a lonely village in the region of La Noguera.
Without thinking about it too much, he moved in with his partner and, in order to establish themselves -since they also wanted to open a restaurant-, they decided to keep one of the houses: “What we did not know is that we had bought something more than that house, we had bought a nucleus uninhabited”, he explained to Diari de Tarragona.
In said article, he recalls how it all happened: “It was an incredible house, the only one that was still standing. Its frescoes on the wall stood out, the calm of a beach, painted in such a way that the light changed depending on the time of day in the that was coming in”.
They decided to rehabilitate it, but to do so they had to first find the owners, a matter that was not easy for them. “Even when we had already located the owner, the person from the real estate agency made the wrong house so, obviously, of a key chain with eight keys, none matched the lock. I had to personally take it to the house,” Ortiz told Diari from Tarragona.
And it was when they bought it that they realized that, more than a home, they had acquired “5,500 square meters, which included other houses, orchards and terraces”, which is equivalent to practically the uninhabited nucleus of La Figuera. A casual story with an incredible ending.
