Year-round · Included
The thermal baths
Monchique's Roman-era thermal springs are a twenty-minute walk from the house. We arrange private morning access for guests, before the public hours open. You will be the only ones there.
A private retreat on the southern slope of the mountain. Three bedrooms, six guests, by Miguel & Hanna. Opening autumn 2027.
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Veluma began as a question: what would a retreat look like if it weren't one?
Not a wellness hotel. Not a yoga resort. Not a programme, a protocol, or a seven-day reset.
A house — three bedrooms, a kitchen worth sitting in, a sauna in stone, mornings that unfold at their own pace. Where the light matters more than the Wi-Fi, and the silence takes three days to hear properly.
We are building it into a nineteenth-century ruin on a south-facing slope of the Serra de Monchique. Construction begins January 2027. The first guests arrive in the autumn.
The Serra de Monchique rises from the south of Portugal forty minutes before the coast becomes the Atlantic. Cork oak and chestnut, eucalyptus and olive. Water that still comes from springs. A climate held mild by the ocean on one side and the mountain on the other.
The Romans walked here for the thermal baths. The Moors terraced the schist into gardens. For a thousand years this has been a place people come to recover — from empire, from illness, from themselves. The land is old in a way that feels restorative rather than tired.
There is no resort here. No airport traffic. A small town with a Sunday market and two cafés that have been there long enough. This is the kind of quiet that takes time to hear.
Three bedrooms. A kitchen that faces the valley. A roof that follows the land. Exterior walls of local schist, laid by hand as they have been in these hills for centuries. Interiors of pale wood and white render — cool in summer, warm in winter, quiet in every light.
Windows sized for the specific view each one frames, rather than for symmetry. A sauna on the terrace. A cold plunge in a natural granite basin we are restoring from the ruin.
We chose the studio for one reason: they make buildings that do not shout at the landscape. The house is not the event. The place is.
Architecture — Preliminary study by the studio, July 2025. Final commission pending. Construction begins January 2027.
There is no itinerary. A small number of things you can do, well, slowly. Everything below is included in a stay, unless noted. We don't bolt wellness on as a package — it is simply what is here.
Monchique's Roman-era thermal springs are a twenty-minute walk from the house. We arrange private morning access for guests, before the public hours open. You will be the only ones there.
Sauna on the terrace. Cold plunge in a granite basin restored from the ruin on the property. Not performance wellness — the simple oscillation of hot and cold that the body already knows how to use.
No breakfast buffet. A long table. Bread baked in the village that morning, olive oil from the grove three hundred metres down the hill, eggs from the neighbour. The newspaper nobody reads.
Four hours through the chestnut forest and up to the ridgeline, led by a local who knows every mushroom, every spring, every abandoned shepherd's hut. What we gather becomes dinner.
Once a week, dinner is served in silence. Three courses, thirty minutes, no conversation. The point is not austerity. The point is to eat, for once, without performing.
Rooms designed for deep sleep. Blackout, low-gain lighting, 18 °C, no screens anywhere. The single thing most guests tell us they didn't know they came for — and most often stay an extra night to repeat.
Two people. One from Portugal, one from the north. One who spent a decade helping Nordic and Iberian companies cross borders, and one who wanted a reason to come south.
We started looking for this land in 2024 and found it by walking. We are not hoteliers. We are building the kind of place we wanted to find when we most needed one, and couldn't.
You can follow the build in the Founders List below — sparingly, perhaps one letter a month, no filler.
— Miguel & Hanna, Founders
We are keeping numbers small. The first people on the list will receive private progress updates, first choice of dates when bookings open, and founder rates held for the first season.
From €300 per night when we open. Founder rates lower, and reserved for this list.
One email, perhaps two, per quarter. Nothing else.