Real de La Quinta History

The landscape of the lower slopes of the Sierra Blanca had changed once before in the beginning of the 19th century, where the mountainside was covered in oak woodlands.

Manuel Agustín Heredia (1786 – 1846) was originally from Rabanera de Cameros in La Rioja, and moved to Malaga at the age of fifteen, finding work as a shop assistant. He started his first business in 1808 during the War of Independence. He traded nuts, wine from Malaga, and graphite from Benahavís with Gibraltar. 

In 1813, he married Doña Isabel Livermore Salas, who was the daughter of Don Tomás Livermore Page, an English merchant based in Malaga and sister-in-law of the Marquis of Salamanca. 

In 1826, Heredia led a consortium to build Ferrería de la Concepción in Marbella, the iron foundry that was the first blast furnace to operate in Spain.  El Angel foundry followed some months later, both were located on the west bank of the Rio Verde in Marbella. La Concepcion’s ruins survive today, albeit in desperate need of preservation. El Angel became part of the San Pedro farming cooperative. A new mine was opened; Mina de Peñoncillo near Istán. The project was initially not so successful and most of the shareholders pulled out. Undeterred Heredia, working with a military engineer in 1833 built Fábrica de La Constancia foundry in Malaga city to refine the Marbella production. It was fuelled by Coal shipped in from the UK to produce higher-grade stronger cast iron. 

The Marbella ironworks consumed all the trees on the Sierra Blanca. When they had exhausted those supplies, they began on the woodland of Benahavis although, fortunately, it didn’t suffer to the same extent as Marbella.

 By 1840, Manuel Agustín Heredia was the wealthiest businessman in Spain. In his Malaga residence, his daughter, Amalia Heredia y Livermore, would in 1855 create the Jardines de la Concepción botanical garden with botanical species from all over the world. He purchased large quantities of land in Benahavís and built his country residence.   

It is difficult to imagine today that the size of this Alcuzcuz estate was owned by a single person. Suffice to say years later from this enormous estate, several huge estates were sectioned in the mid-twentieth century. One to the west was called Tramores, later owned by the Goldsmith’s family. Another to the north was called La Baraka, later owned by Saudi Arabian businessman Adnan Khashoggi and became La Zagaleta in 1991. Another to the east of the Ronda road was El Madroñal.

The Alcuzcuz estate gained its hispano-arabic name from the interesting wheat product made there. It was made of little balls of flour paste and honey, which were steamed and put into an earthenware container that had holes that allowed the steam from a larger container to enter. Variations of the product included adding fresh butter, sugar, and raisins to form the cous cous we know today. 

Manuel Heredia died in 1846 and Alcuzcuz was inherited by his daughter, Maria Heredia y Livermore who married Andrés Parladé y Sánchez de Quirós, Conde de Aguiar. They built the current estate house in 1850. This in turn was inherited by her son Andres Paladé Heredia (1859-1933)   By the 1960s the now smaller Alcuzcuz estate was inherited by renowned interior designer Jaime Parladé Gross and his British wife Janette.

Jaime Parladé Gross built the beautiful La Heredia ‘village’ development in the 1980s, which still stands out as a beautiful example of a modern Andalusian ‘chocolate box’ village on the hill in pastel shades. Parladé died in 2015 and the current estate house, now called Dehesa de Alcuzcuz has been turned into a peaceful boutique hotel decorated in a style influenced by six generations.

The southern part of the Alcuzcuz estate became a select Urbanización (housing complex) and was also chosen by BRIGHT to construct their award-winning Villa Alcuzcuz.   

To the east, on land originally belonging to the El Mardronal estate, Tomás Pascual developed La Quinta in the 1980s and later planned the Real de La Quinta project.