There came a point where the city stopped making sense for us. We are Narda (Dutch) and Luc (Belgian), the owners of Torres de Selma, and the decision to leave was not a dramatic one, not all at once, just a steady quieting of conviction that the life we were living was the life we wanted.
We found Torres de Selma and recognised something in it immediately. The two towers. The ancient rock it sits on. The mountains stretching out beyond the property. A wildness to the land that felt, somehow, like an answer.
The farmhouse itself needed considerable care. Years of renovation followed. We worked slowly, deliberately, preserving what was already beautiful: the old stonework, the proportions of the rooms, the traces of the people and centuries that had passed through before us. Where we needed to modernise, we chose comfort without compromising character.
Outside, the transformation was just as meaningful. We introduced permaculture and built several lakes to support local biodiversity. The gardens produce food. The animals move freely. Walking paths take you somewhere worth arriving.
While all of this was taking shape, something else was quietly growing alongside it. Years before Torres de Selma, we had travelled to India and encountered Ayurveda for the first time. The treatments worked in ways that surprised us. Not just on the surface, but deep in the body, in our sleep, in the way we woke up in the mornings. It felt less like a holiday and more like meeting ourselves again.
We knew, even then, that we wanted to find a way to share this. Not by replicating India, but by bringing the same depth of care and traditional knowledge to a place people could actually reach.
As Torres de Selma began to take form, we saw that this was it. The setting was right. The pace was right. The philosophy of living gently and attentively matched everything we had come to believe about real health.
Not everyone can travel to Kerala. But the longing for this kind of healing, the real, slow, attentive kind, is something we hear in almost every conversation with our guests. And so we made it our work to bring the knowledge here, into these Catalan mountains, into this old stone house where we had already chosen to build a quieter life.
Through fortunate timing and genuine connection, we found our way to extraordinary people. Among them, Guru Yogi Shivan, founder of the Indimasi Healing Village in Kerala, whose generosity and wisdom have shaped so much of what we are building here. And alongside Guruji, other gifted Ayurvedic practitioners from India who are joining us to bring their knowledge to Torres de Selma.
We are not Ayurvedic practitioners ourselves. What we are is people who have felt what this healing tradition can do, and who believe it deserves a proper home in Europe. One where the setting is right, the pace is right, and the people guiding you have been trained in the classical tradition.
Torres de Selma is now the place we always hoped we might find. Off the grid, inside a living landscape, shaped by a philosophy that puts the health of people and the health of the earth in the same sentence. It is where we live. And it is where we invite you to arrive, slow down, and stay for a while.