Travel ideas: A holiday home to relax like a hobbit

The Shire is now located in western Spain. It has private houses with brightly colored round doors, surrounded by forests and a stream and impressive mountains in the background. Obviously, neither Bilbo, Frodo or Sam live there, but everything has been built in such a way that anyone familiar with these characters through books or movies will be reminded of them, and perhaps even feel like them.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” is how J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit begins. The story, a classic of universal literature, narrates the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, a small being who lived in a quiet place surrounded by nature. Based on the story, the entrepreneurial couple Iryna Zhelvanava and Óscar Muñoz launched the Comarca de Vératton project in the north of the Extremadura region, within the municipality of Villanueva de la Vera (Cáceres). The location has a lot of real-life history as well: it is near here that Emperor Charles I of Spain and V of Germany spent his last years, in the Monastery of Yuste.

The project that kept Zhelvanava and Muñoz busy for more than 10 years encompasses three houses embedded in a grassy hill, similar to those seen in the Lord of the Rings films. “The project has a lot to do with us, with our hobbies,” explains Muñoz. “I am very interested in architecture, particularly bioclimatic and fantasy architecture.” In his opinion, human beings have sought to feel protected since their origins, and doing so under layers of earth has something ancestral about it, something that comes to us straight from our cave-dwelling ancestors.

The idea of bringing Tolkien’s fantasy world to the Extremadura countryside arose in 2012. The first steps consisted of looking for an area that was consistent with the story. Two plots of land were considered, one in the province of Ávila and another in the north of Cáceres. “We looked at many plots of land, and we found some that could fit the bill, but they had power lines or were too close to the villages. We didn’t like it at all because of the light pollution.” Then, at the time of greatest crisis due to the Covid pandemic, the entrepreneurs decided on the final location. Villanueva de la Vera, in the province of Cáceres, has since become a meeting point for fans of The Lord of the Rings.

In addition to the land on which to develop their idea, the project also involved buying 19th-century furniture. “Our job was to restore furniture that we bought in different places, as well as all kinds of tableware such as English porcelain plates and glasses,” say the owners.

The biggest challenge was to create houses similar to those inhabited by hobbits and those that appear in the Lord of the Rings saga. They put themselves in the hands of a local builder who was also enthusiastic about the project. The houses are built on a plot of about 100,000 square metres that takes advantage of the side of a hill to embed the three houses that make up the complex.

As for the development process, its creators say that it was very hard due to the workload and the emotional stress. “The initial idea was to build four houses, but we had to do without one because of the increase in the price of materials. We don’t know if we will expand in the future, but we need to stabilize ourselves,” say the entrepreneurs, who went through a long and tortuous journey to reach not Mordor but their crazy dream.

Building houses like these requires a lot of craftsmanship. For example, the iconic round wooden door, which also has to close tightly. The facilities have their own photovoltaic panels with batteries that are not connected to the grid, and the fact that the roof is not flat also complicated the installation. In short, “it was a crazy idea for two geeks who had been excited about this project for many years,” says Muñoz.

The madness finally took shape on a ten-hectare plot of land with incredible views of the Almanzor peak in the Sierra de Gredos mountain range. Then, it was time to give a name to that madness. The little houses are called El Carpintero (The Carpenter), with its characteristic round green door that appears in the films; La Costurera (The Seamstress), with a yellow door, and El Druida (The Druid), with a red door.

Regarding the region of La Vera, in Cáceres, the couple say that they saw something special and somewhat similar to the world of Tolkien. “It maintains its traditions, and the way of life of the people is very similar to what we know about the hobbits,” says Muñoz. “As a child I came to spend the summer in the area, it always seemed to me a region where time seems to have stood still.”

The entrepreneurs are not doing badly these days. They say that the public’s reaction has been very good and that travellers interested in fantasy and nature come from far away, especially from Britain, the Netherlands and the United States. As for the name of the project, Comarca de Vératton, they say that the first part of it is a nod to Tolkien’s work (a comarca is a demarcation similar to shire) and the second to the Vettones, a pre-Roman people who lived in the area during the Iron Age.

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