For the last 4 years, every week, the gardeners came and shaped the bush beside the pool into a topiary spiral. An awkward shape for a plant. We felt awkward for it too — but it was the landlord's house, his gardeners, his design. We hadn't much say in how someone else's property should feel.
We lived in a rented villa in one of those neighbourhoods near Valencia, where the hedges are symmetrical, and the private school is around the corner, and someone else's staff manages every surface. It was a beautiful life. It wasn't ours.
I was pregnant.
Alisher and I sat down, and did what I think a lot of people do when they're about to become parents. We took a hard look at the life we were living, and asked what it was actually built on. What would we do in a crisis? What did we want for our child?
The answer we kept coming back to was the same. Autonomy. Space. Something we actually owned, and could build upon. Not a borrowed life, however comfortable it was.
So I wrote myself a brief. Maximum space, minimum compromise. Minimal infrastructure — a ruin was fine, a shell was fine. Something with the bones of a future in it.
When we decided to find land, we already knew the answer to this part.
Alisher grew up in a cold industrial town in Russia. Winter there meant grim architecture, snow, frost, little light. And at Christmas — oranges from Valencia, with stickers. He kept those stickers. For their design, their colour, the warmth they carried from somewhere he had never been. An orange, to him, was a signal that another kind of world existed.
For me, it was a fragrance factory in the south of France. I was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Someone handed me a vial of sweet orange blossom essential oil. I inhaled once. That was it — the single scent I have loved most in my life, and still do today. Before that, oranges were what I ate as a child in winter, at my desk, doing homework, needing the sugar and the cold-day sweetness of them.
When we sat down and said land, orchard — both of us had already answered orange.
There are wine producers in Valencia, and olive groves, and almonds, and grazing land for sheep and goats, and forested hillsides. We looked at all of it. But an orange grove, on a limestone hillside, above a valley, in the light of Valencia — that was the only choice that felt like both of ours. Already. Before we found it.
Alisher was in Argentina. He had been in Argentina the whole time I was viewing.
Late in my pregnancy, I drove an hour from our villa alone. Surrounded by mountains. Green, warm, in the middle of winter. Oranges left and right, as far as the eye could see.
I walked the house with a contractor, who confirmed the renovation was challenging — but doable.
I sent Alisher everything I could — videos, photos, calls from the hillside. He agreed to proceed.
We came to the farm together only after the baby was born. Construction had already started — on a place neither of us had yet walked together.
The farm was quiet, the first time we walked it together. That's the word that stays with me. Not beautiful. Not overwhelming. Quiet. The valley below us was the Júcar plain — green and irrigated and busy. Up here, on the limestone hillside, nothing was moving. There was a half-ruined farmhouse, eleven hundred citrus trees on terraces, one point seven hectares of tall pine above them, and a view that went all the way to the sea, on a clear day.
The listing hadn't mentioned the geology.
The geology report came a few months after we signed the deed. I commissioned it because I wanted to understand what I'd bought. I was a UX designer, not a farmer. I didn't speak Spanish. Jacinto, who had worked this grove for longer than any document I could find, knew more about these trees than I would learn in a year. What I could do was read.
What the report said... stopped me.
The rock under the grove is Upper Cretaceous Senonian limestone — the compressed shells of marine creatures that lived eighty million years ago, when the Pyrenees didn't exist, and the Iberian Peninsula was an island. This hillside was the floor of a warm, shallow sea. The thin red soil the trees grow in took between one thousand and ten thousand years per centimetre to form, from limestone weathering. The thirty centimetres beneath the roots represent somewhere between three hundred thousand and three million years.
I had bought a farm. I had found... eighty million years.
That changes what you think you're doing here.
The limestone explains the fruit. Thin soil and fast drainage create the kind of water stress that winemakers in Burgundy deliberately engineer — it concentrates sugars, spikes aromatics, makes the orange taste of the place it grew, rather than just of itself. The same rock that makes farming difficult makes the fruit exceptional. The difficulty is the point.
It explains the forest, too. The tall Aleppo pines above the grove were planted in the 1950s, under Franco's reforestation programme. They stopped erosion. They are also highly flammable, ecologically wrong for limestone substrate, and not what this hillside is trying to be. The native climax species for this elevation and this rock is Quercus ilex — holm oak — which lives for seven hundred years, builds soil instead of exhausting it, and is already regenerating naturally in the gaps where the pine canopy opens. The hillside has been waiting.
It explains the water beneath us. A karst aquifer, fed by rainfall filtering through limestone fractures, sitting forty-one metres below the grove. Our own water, on our own geological formation, above the flood plain. In October twenty twenty-four, the DANA storm dropped five hundred millimetres of rain in eight hours on the Valencia region. The valley below us flooded catastrophically. The limestone shed water through its fractures and recharged the aquifer.
Height is resilience. Rock is memory.
We named the farm Tariqa. In Sufi tradition, tariqa means the path. Not the destination. The way of moving through the world, toward something.
What we're building here didn't start as a business plan. It started as a response to what the land was already saying. A farm that's open to visitors who want to understand where their food comes from, and what eighty million years of geology looks like when you're standing on it.
The gardeners used to come every week, and shape our trees into topiary spirals.
Nobody is doing that here.
The limestone has been at this for longer than we have.