WHEN ANTHONY ARNOLD arrived in the Andalusian hamlet of Jorox in 1993 the local population of nine ran into the street to marvel at the novelty of seeing a car. They were even more amazed when the Englishman later started to build a road to the ruined mill that he had just bought.
“This place was so undeveloped that a car was unheard of and the road petered out before it reached my house,” says Arnold, whose move to Spain came as the unusual result of boredom with being a spy. A fluent Russian and German speaker, he joined the British Secret Service in the 1980s, following in the footsteps of his “real 007” father. “But it was the most tedious thing I’ve ever done,” says Arnold, 55.
“I just sat in an office wearing headphones to detect where planes had come from.”
So, disillusioned with the humdrum world of international espionage, he turned to more spiritual pursuits such as Buddhism and healing and headed to Spain to set up a yoga centre.
He stumbled across Jorox, famous for its pure spring water from the Rio Grande river, and bought a desolate piece of land with the remains of an old mill for £6,000.
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Over the years, the ruin became the impressive Molino del Rey, with a yoga hall, 12 exotically decorated bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a restaurant, massage room and a large sauna beside the swimming pool. A further domed building on a lower stretch of garden provides seclusion and views for miles across the valley.
“I didn’t have any experience of building and didn’t hire an architect. I just had an idea of what it had to be like and I started working on the place flat out, with my hands, a hammer and chisel and with the help of the local postman, policeman and our two cooks,” says Arnold.
He found himself with more DIY than he had bargained for when he unearthed a honeycomb of caves in the garden. “I noticed a hole in the rock, started digging and realised it led into a cave. I spent the next six years digging out the caves with my hands, carrying thousands of buckets of earth and rubble,” he recalls.
“There was no room for a bulldozer and it hadn’t occurred to me that I could use a pneumatic drill, so my knees took the brunt of all the digging. The caves were only 1ft high when I started so I had to dig down. I followed the bats as I knew they had to be coming from somewhere.”
Entering the caves near the pool, a welcome coolness envelopes you. Candles and statues of the Buddha are dotted around ledges and some parts of the cave floor have been tiled, allowing visiting yogis to find a secluded niche to lay their mat. At one point the caves lead to the glass doors of the yoga hall, a vast, airy room where sound echoes dramatically.
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“It’s perfect for sound healing,” says Arnold, passing by a bongo drum in the corner. “The caves provide a total contrast with a dead acoustic, which is great for chanting.”
Although Jorox’s population has yet to reach double figures, the branch of the new road to the town of Ronda is being upgraded from rocky track to tarmac, much to the delight of the Spanish picnickers who flee the coast for this untouched area of the Sierra de las Nieves at weekends. When the road opens later this year, this peaceful valley will be within 40 minutes’ drive of Marbella. While Jorox’s inhabitants seem happily removed from modernity, property prices in nearby Yunquera and Alozaina are moving with the times.
Ray Allon, from Anglospan, which specialises in rural Andalusian properties, says: “Prices rose by 36 per cent in the surrounding area in 2003 and that trend has continued, with the few villas that are available costing from €250,000 (£166,000) and a new two-bedroom townhouse costing around €200,000.” A spacious, renovated villa with panoramic views will cost the best part of €500,000.
“British buyers increasingly want the country lifestyle and this area is special because of its biosphere reserve,” says Allon. “Property availability is restricted, even more so with new planning laws. So anything you buy around here is a sound investment. When the new road is completed, we expect prices to leap up even more.”
From Molino del Rey, though, you can forget about such things as market forces because you are more likely to be overwhelmed by the smell of orange blossom as soon as you step out of the house and the sound of water gushing from the stream cascading down the rocks to an old Arab-period waterway that Arnold found running beneath the house.
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From spying on Russians to marrying one, Arnold and his wife, Lidiya, a masseuse, keep the house busy with yoga courses for much of the year. But despite the accolades, Arnold has put Molino del Rey up for sale with Lighthouse, a network of Spanish estate agents. “If the buyer isn’t a yoga fan, the property will make a great place for rural tourism,” he says. Otherwise it would make an exceptional private home. Just think how handy those caves would be when you need to get away from it all.
The property is for sale for €2.95 million, which will test the powers of a psychic whom Arnold met in 1988. She recounted his entire childhood without him having said a word and said he would use water and his voice to heal people. This was not to be his fortune, though. That, she added, would come from the rather less esoteric world of property.
www.molinodelrey.com; www.lighthouse-spain.com, 0845 0450420.