About
La Molineta is a small collection of holiday villas in the La Molineta hamlet, nestled in the hills just outside Frigiliana in Spain's Andalucía. Each villa has been carefully maintained to offer comfort, character, and a true sense of place.
We're not a hotel chain or a faceless management company. We're hands-on hosts who know every corner of these properties and the surrounding area. When you book with us, you get personal attention, local knowledge, and the assurance that someone genuinely cares about your holiday.
Frigiliana has been voted the prettiest village in Andalucía, and we're biased, but we think it deserves the title. The whitewashed streets, the views from the hills, the warmth of the local community - it's a place that stays with you.
Our Story
La Molineta
La Molineta is a disused sugar, flour and paper mill dating from the seventeenth century, occupying an ancient, possibly pre-Roman, site on the road between Nerja and Frigiliana. Funerary jars from 600 BC have been found nearby, and an elegant Roman doll was unearthed in the grounds.
The walled hamlet was found in 1965, in ruins, by Lady Wakefield's mother, a painter who had lived in Italy and in the hills behind Nice and who recognised here something that was already slipping away from coastal Provence. Sir Peter and Lady Wakefield bought the ruins and restored them across the long gaps between diplomatic postings. They decided not to employ an architect; instead, they slowly and carefully brought the original fifteen houses back into the characterful villas that stand today. What could be propped up was saved; the rest was allowed to disintegrate into romantic courtyards and secluded patches of garden.
The earliest photograph we have of the place shows what they took on. Roofs fallen in, window openings empty, the hillside bare, and the terraces below the wall still being worked as farmland. Almost everything standing here today was brought back from that.
The great barn at the heart of the complex - once filled with boulders, pigs and rusting machinery - became the main house, its majestic proportions preserved, its walls given several coats of whitewash, and its original seventeenth-century arches opening onto a swimming pool where the old mill-pool used to be.
Today, four unique villas share this peaceful hillside setting, each with private pools and views that stretch from the mountains to the sea. The spirit of the original mill lives on in the name and character of El Molino Viejo - "the old mill."
Read the 1997 House & Garden feature →
A word from the owner
Simon Wakefield
My grandmother found this place in 1965: a walled hamlet, in ruins. She had lived in Italy and in the hills behind Nice, and she had watched the old ways disappear from coastal Provence. Frigiliana was beautiful but the village was poor, and the fishermen at Nerja still pulled their boats up onto the sand at Burriana. She was a painter and some of her paintings still hang in El Molino Viejo.
My parents bought the ruins and began the slow work of putting the houses back, interrupted by long diplomatic postings abroad. They had spent years in Arab countries and brought their treasures home with them, and they had an eye that sat easily with the way things had always been built here. Being early gave us the unexpected pleasure of giving many of the then young men in the village their first jobs. They are old men now, and they still greet my 90-year-old mother when she visits.
By the 1980s the houses were standing again and we began letting them. The shape of the place did the rest. A hamlet lets families holiday together and still close their own front door at the end of the day, with El Molino the focal point in the middle. The acequia, the old irrigation channel, runs straight through the property. It drove three mills here, one for flour, one for sugar cane and one for paper, and it filled the pool we swam in, which was cold even in the middle of August.
Things changed at the turn of the century. My parents moved up to Periana for a quieter life, my father died in 2010, and much of the hamlet was sold. I kept the four houses we let today. The same local families still look after them, which is a source of joy, and we keep putting money back into them; at the moment into solar.
We miss the old ways, but the change has not all been negative. Málaga airport is an easy drive and the coast has everything a modern town has. Behind us the national park runs unbroken along the coast east of Nerja, which is why the beaches out that way are still empty and the walking and the cycling are as good as they are, and the great Moorish cities of Andalucía are each a day out. The thing I have come to value most is the site itself: 230 metres up, between the mountains and the sea, with old stone walls built into the hillside. It makes its own micro-climate, and in a warming world that is a luxury.
None of it works without guests who see these houses for what they are. They are the reason we can keep looking after them, and we hope you love them as much as we do.
Your hosts on the ground
Sam & Juve
Sam and Juve manage La Molineta day to day and have looked after the villas for around twenty years. They welcome you on arrival, hand over the keys, and keep the villas, pools and gardens in the shape you see in the photos.
They live in Frigiliana itself, know the village and the coast inside out, and are the people to contact for anything during your stay, from restaurant tips to an extra cot.
Reach them any time: