Designer wine hotel for weddings on the Alentejo plains

Whitewashed walls with ochre trim, terracotta pantiles and rust-red stable doors: the farm buildings look the way Alentejo farms have for centuries. The architect João Mendes Ribeiro kept them and added new gabled wings in cast concrete, with round windows and sliding glass. A marble-cobbled walk runs around a clay-paved yard. Rosarinho Gabriel filled the rooms with vintage finds, from a white upright piano to a dinosaur skeleton hung from a ceiling. The house calls the look country chic, and it fits.

The first record of a house here dates from 1338, and the square tower with its four turrets gave the farm its name. Long before that, the Basilii family ran one of the largest Roman villas in Iberia a kilometer down the track. It was rediscovered in 1947, and its mosaics of the Muses and of horses now hang in Lisbon's national archaeology museum. After 1974 the farm passed to a cooperative and fell into ruin. Two Lisbon pharmacists, Ana Isabel and Paulo Rebelo, restored it and opened the hotel in 2014.

Most guests fly into Lisbon and drive: it's a little over 200 kilometers, about two and a half hours, most of it motorway. Badajoz airport, just over the Spanish border, is nearer for anyone arriving through Spain. There's a railway station at Portalegre, twenty-two kilometers away. Parking inside the walls is free, with two chargers for electric cars. The hotel runs transfers from the airport, and we time them around your guests' flights so everyone arrives together.

Most bedrooms are on the ground floor and one is adapted for guests with limited mobility. The chapel is reached by three granite steps, but the gates, the olive grove and the vineyard are level, and the courtyard is firm packed clay. Paths between the buildings are gravel and marble cobbles, so wheels roll but not smoothly. The tower roof is stairs only. Tell us what you need and we'll check the details with the hotel before you book.

Nineteen rooms and suites sleep up to fifty: three doubles, seven superior doubles, eight junior suites and a master suite with its own small pool. They're spread between the old manor and the converted stables and cottages. Each has air conditioning and underfloor heating in the bathroom, and the junior suites have wood-burning fireplaces for winter. A wedding takes all nineteen for at least two nights, so the whole party sleeps on site. Check-in is from three, check-out at noon, and the outdoor pool never closes.

The chapel of Nossa Senhora da Conceição holds canonical permission for weddings, so a Catholic ceremony can be celebrated inside it. Expect a marble altar and a few rows of pews. Civil ceremonies have been held on the estate too, out in the olive grove with a registrar coming to you. The spot in most of our photos is the marble-piered gates, swung open onto the plain with clear chairs on the cobbles. The vineyard rows, the pine stand and the main courtyard all work as well. Our Portugal wedding planner assists with the paperwork and the booking of the registrar or priest.

Dinner has three indoor homes. The Adega, the winery, seats a hundred among the barrels. The bar in the old stables, called Cortejo de Baco, takes about as many under basket lamps and white trusses, and the restaurant, PALMA, seats eighty. In summer most couples eat outside. That means one long table down the courtyard lit by candelabra and fire pits, or a clear-roofed marquee raised in the same courtyard for a bigger crowd. Tables here are bare wood, white linen, olive branches and gypsophila. See our packages for a wedding in Portugal for what's included.

All food is cooked in house by chef Eduardo Grilo, who grew up in Arronches down the road, so there's no outside caterer to find. The kitchen leans Alentejo: tomato soup the local way, black pork cheeks with bread migas and orange, octopus with smashed potato and a gaspacho pickle. Vegetables and herbs come from the estate's organic garden, cheese and olive oil from producers nearby. Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and dairy-free menus are available; tell us early and we'll have them built in.

The estate makes its own wine: seven grape varieties on seven hectares of clay-loam over limestone and schist. The grapes are hand-picked and trodden in small marble lagares in the winery that opened in 2016. Reds lean on Aragonez, Alicante Bouschet, Touriga Nacional and Tinta Miúda; whites on Antão Vaz, Arinto and Alvarinho. Winemaker Duarte de Deus runs tastings in the barrel room, and a glass on the tower roof at sunset is a house ritual. Pour the estate's own at dinner and your guests can walk out to the rows it grew in.

Nothing here closes early. There's no curfew on the party and no cut-off for the music, indoors or out, and couples have danced in the courtyard until sunrise. Bands set up under the olive trees for the cocktail hour and DJs take a dance floor laid in the courtyard. The bar in the old stables carries the late shift. Fire pits, candle-lit paths and sparklers are part of the repertoire, and cold-spark fountains have lit the cake cutting. The tower roof is where guests drift for the last of the light.

The riding center keeps Lusitano horses: ride out through the vines with an instructor, take a first lesson in the arena, or let the kids help groom and feed them. There's a heated indoor pool with a jacuzzi, hammam and sauna, an unheated outdoor pool, bikes to borrow and a spa working with grape seed and honey. Stargazing is a bookable activity because the sky is that dark, and the Roman villa is a guided visit with an archaeologist. For couples planning destination weddings across Portugal that run to a week, this is the half where nobody drives anywhere.

One wedding at a time, and the estate is yours. Booking all nineteen rooms for two nights closes the hotel to other guests: both pools, the spa, the restaurant and bar, the chapel, the tower, the winery, the olive grove and the vines. The two-night minimum works in your favor; a welcome dinner the night before and a slow farewell brunch are the usual shape. There's no minimum guest count, and the estate has hosted an elopement for two. The buyout stays the buyout, though, so it suits couples bringing their people with them.