How much does a wedding at Casa La Siesta cost?

Where the €19,000 goes

Casa La Siesta is a boutique country house hotel outside Vejer de la Frontera, in the far south-west of Andalusia, and it does not sell wedding days. It sells the whole hotel for a minimum of three nights, and the published from-price of €19,000 is the cost of that takeover. The venue's note on the figure spells out what it carries: exclusive use for three nights, beds for 22 people, cleaning every day of the stay, and breakfast each morning for the wedding party sleeping in the house. Nobody else is on the property while you are there, and the two swimming pools and the walled gardens belong to your group from the first afternoon to the last.

Read that way, the price is closer to renting a staffed private house than hiring a reception room. The wedding is one evening inside a three-day stay, and the beds, the breakfasts and the housekeeping are what the hire is really paying for. A couple who want a single evening at a venue with no stay attached will find the figure high; a couple who want a long weekend with their closest people under one roof will find it covers more than most.

The food, the bar and what is still to pay

Catering is in-house and quoted from €125 per person, with wines sourced locally. That figure sits on top of the hire and is the only other number the record gives. Drinks come from the hotel's licensed bar and are not priced per head in the record, so ask for the bar packages when you enquire rather than assuming they are folded into the food. Beyond those two lines you are still paying for the photographer, the flowers, the music, hair and make-up, and transport for any guests coming up from the coast. An on-site coordination team is listed among the venue's features, which takes a separate planning fee off the list if you were budgeting for one, though the suppliers themselves remain yours to choose and pay.

Three guest lists, one hire

The rows below put the fixed hire against the per-head catering at 40, 80 and 120 guests, the last being the venue's ceiling for both the ceremony and the reception. Nothing else is added: no bar, no extra nights, no suppliers. Treat each total as the floor for the venue and the food.

The hire is identical whether 40 or 120 people sit down to dinner, so the venue's share of the cost per guest shrinks as the list fills. A couple inviting 40 are paying for three nights largely on behalf of the 22 who sleep there; a couple inviting 120 spread the same hire across a party three times the size. That arithmetic is common to every house priced with the nights in, and it is why the budget calculator is worth running at your real guest count rather than a round one.

Beds for 22, or 25

The hire includes beds for 22 guests. The record also says the hotel sleeps up to 25 in total, so there is a small margin of places beyond the 22 that the price covers, and it is worth asking how those are charged. For most weddings the 22 are the couple, both sets of parents and the closest friends, with everyone else in Vejer de la Frontera, a white hill town with its own hotels and guesthouses, or down at the beach. If your whole guest list fits inside 25 beds, the entire wedding sleeps in one house for three nights, which is a different kind of celebration from a single evening with a taxi at the end of it. The venue is child friendly, pets are welcome, there is parking on site and disabled access is listed, all of which matter more over a stay than over a day. Our guide to Spanish venues where the beds come with the hire covers the other houses that work this way.

Three nights or seven

Three nights is the shortest booking the hotel takes, and the record says the exclusive hire can extend to seven. The longer stay suits couples who want a week of swimming, eating and sitting in the gardens with the wedding somewhere in the middle, and it suits guests who have flown a long way to be there. El Palmar beach is a 15-minute drive, which fills the day before or the day after without anyone needing a plan. The record does not say how the extra nights are priced, so treat the seven-night option as a question for the venue rather than a multiple of anything on this page. For couples weighing a three-night booking against a longer one, our guide to three-day wedding weekends in Spain sets out how other venues handle the extra days.

Gardens, beach or church

Three ceremony settings are listed. The first is the gardens that surround the house, which is where a ceremony on the estate takes place. The second is El Palmar beach, 15 minutes away by car, for couples who want the Atlantic behind them. The third is a church: the record notes two close to the property for a religious service. The hotel is licensed for marriage, and the licence attaches to the venue rather than to you. Most non-resident foreign couples cannot hold the legally binding civil ceremony in Spain, so the usual pattern is a symbolic ceremony in the gardens with the legal paperwork completed at home before or after. Our guide to how to get married in Spain walks through the options. A bridal changing room and a sound system are on the venue's list of features, so the ceremony and the speeches are covered without hiring either.

Getting to Vejer

The nearest airport by straight line is Jerez (XRY), about 50 km from the hotel. The record gives no drive times, so plan with the airport distance and the knowledge that Vejer sits a little inland from the Costa de la Luz, with El Palmar beach a 15-minute drive from the hotel. For a guest list arriving from abroad, a single airport and one road south is as little logistics as a rural Spanish wedding ever involves, and with 22 beds in the hire the people who matter most are already on site when the rest arrive.

How it compares across Andalusia

Several other Andalusian venues publish a price that carries the nights, and the three below show how differently the same idea can be priced. Their figures come from their own records.

• Jimena de la Frontera · Andalusia

  Cortijo Roman

  up to 180 guests · sleeps 22 · 2-night minimum · from €25,000

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• San Martín del Tesorillo · Andalusia

  Finca La Gloria

  up to 100 guests · sleeps 15 · 3-night minimum · from €25,000 · catering €160 a head

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• Monesterio · Andalusia

  La Dehesa de Don Pedro

  up to 300 guests · sleeps 48 · 2-night minimum · from €9,500

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Finca La Gloria, inland near the Gibraltar end of the coast, publishes €25,000 with three nights for 14 and catering at €160 a head, so a higher hire for fewer beds and dearer food, with a ceiling of 100 guests. Cortijo Roman is also €25,000, but that figure is for 120 guests with two nights for 22 and the food and drink already inside it, which makes it an all-in package rather than a hire plus catering. La Dehesa de Don Pedro publishes €9,500 with two nights for 37, takes up to 300 and sleeps 48, with the food quoted on enquiry. Casa La Siesta sits between them: more beds in the hire than La Gloria, less than Don Pedro, and with the catering figure published rather than left to the quote.

The Andalusia wedding cost guide reads every priced venue in the region the same way, venues by budget sorts the whole collection into bands, and the venue index shows each house's figures at a glance.

Who should book it

Casa La Siesta rewards a guest list of 80 to 120 and a wedding party that wants to live together for three nights. The hire is doing most of its work in the beds and breakfasts, so the couple who get the best value are the ones who fill the 22 places and treat the stay as the celebration. If you want a smaller wedding that still sleeps everyone, the 25 beds make a wedding of that size possible, though the hire will feel heavier per head; our guide to small and intimate venues in Spain lists houses that start lower. If you want a cortijo with hundreds of guests and no curfew, this is not it. If you want a hotel with two pools, a licence, a coordination team and a beach a quarter of an hour away, taken over entirely for a long weekend, it is one of the few in Andalusia that publishes exactly what that costs.