How we found ourselves in Jimena. Garth and I came to Jimena in 1977 to visit his younger brother at Christmas, and we bought the first house within a week of our arrival. We had just sold our third barge in Paris, and had the deposit with us. We had planned to buy a sailing boat and travel, but there was something about living on the land, growing a garden, and maybe having a family. Also, I had had a sort of revelation of being where I belonged while walking one night in the rain. I wanted to live here forever. Garth had grown up in East Africa and was taught by his engineer father to build houses. In a similar vein, as he was not at all academic, he taught himself many of the crafts that interested him, such as repairing engines, and woodwork. I was born to Austrian parents who had emigrated to the U.S. before I was born. They soon moved to Saudi Arabia where my father worked for an oil company until 1979. There we lived in a small American community with a school, a club house, cinema, by the Arabian Sea. An idyllic life but an unreal one in a way. School there finished at 15, and you were then sent to boarding school somewhere partially paid for by the company. So I went to Switzerland and learned French, then Austria for my final year of high school. At home on vacation that year, I met Garth, who was working for a related company to my Father’s. We corresponded for a year, saw each other during the holidays, and then eloped. He sent me a ticket to Turkey and I flew from college in the States to Ankara, to where he had driven in his Mini-Moke from Saudi Arabia. We travelled along the Anatolian coast, sleeping in a tent, up through Greece and Europe to Grimsby. There we joined his elder brother and wife working on a Shetland fishing boat, while we all lived on a dumb barge (one without an engine, used solely for towing) in 2 lorry-bodies. The dumb barge became our home eventually and we sold it with an engine, drive shaft and wood panelling (salvaged from the nearby tip). We sold this and bought another and finally ended up with a beautiful Belgian barge, which after 2 years of living aboard and working on, we sold before coming to Jimena.

The start of el Anon The restaurant idea came from Garth’s brother Steve - he said it would make a great situation, with the patio for summer and cosy inner dining room with a fireplace. So we bought a patch of land at the top of the complex (where the swimming pool is now) for us to live and started renovating the place as a restaurant. It took us a couple of years to make it work, however. The locals were unsure of the international menu, and we had to make to do with adventurous Spaniards from La Linea and Algeciras and a few foreigners we could coax up from the coast. That’s why we started the rooms. When we bought the house next door and built the bar, we started to make money. The young people in the village needed a place to meet where they wouldn’t run into their uncles and fathers, with whom they would have to sit respectfully. The uncles didn’t come in as it was more expensive and had modern music and women working behind the bar. Meanwhile Garth had been renovating houses for other foreigners as well as continuing extensions and improvements on the hotel - well, restaurant with 4 rooms. Little by little we ended up with a full Spanish staff of Jimenatos (villagers) and the 14 rooms with bathrooms en-suite we have today, having added 3 more since Garth’s death in 1994. Sadly, he died of lung cancer at 49; but I was well supported by my staff and helped to keep the business going, even repair and renew. Now the hotel, restaurant and bar do good business, each supporting the other, run by the manager, Gabriel, who has worked for me since 1980. We get many locals in the restaurant now and the hotel has a good mixture of English, German, Dutch and Spaniards from the cities here to enjoy the richness of the surrounding countryside and the still-charming and authentic village life.