Country Life 30-Mar-2022

Treasure island LAST summer’s opening of Hauser & Wirth Menorca, on the historic Isla del Rey, helped to turn this Balearic island, a UNESCO biosphere reserve, into one of the hottest places to be seen in the Mediterranean. The art hub, which features an outdoor sculpture trail by the ruins of a 6th-century basilica, attracts the kind of fashionable crowd more commonly found on Mallorca or Ibiza, drawn by Menorca’s reputation for sustainability, which had already won the island fans looking for ‘green’ destinations. The local food culture is also attracting attention, with Menorca celebrating its status as a European Region of Gastronomy 2022. According to Engel & Völkers, the property market has seen a corresponding lift. Agents are reporting increased demand for private estates in good locations, which offer extraordinary…

Virtual realty MARK ZUCKERBERG’S announcement last October that Facebook was rebranding as Meta sparked a rise in interest in the metaverse, a simulated digital environment. This has been backed by some serious investment and, now, these virtual worlds are no longer the preserve of teen gaming and pop concerts: earlier this year, MetaMetric Solutions, a company that tracks digital property prices, announced that real-estate sales in the metaverse topped $500 million in 2021. Knight Frank’s latest Wealth Report explains that virtual property works in very much the same way as bricks and mortar: ‘Location is key,’ notes Hong Kong entrepreneur Yat Siu. ‘Places that have a higher influence have higher value.’ Some parcels of land in popular worlds have sold for the equivalent of millions of dollars (transactions are in cryptocurrencies) and…

ONE evening, while I was enjoying a cigar in a gondola, I saw Turner in another one sketching San Giorgio, brilliantly lit up by the setting sun. I felt quite ashamed of myself idling away my time whilst he was hard at work so late,’ recalled the painter William Callow. It was late August 1840, when Turner was 65 and still working tirelessly to fill his sketchbooks with the pencil and watercolour studies that were always the absorbing objective of his travels. Indeed, the artist found himself re-energised by this two-week sojourn. In addition to his impressionistic renderings of well-known prospects, he sketched the markets, bragozzi (fishing boats) and buildings, including Santa Lucia (later lost to the railway station), explored poorer quarters such as Dorsoduro and roamed the canals by night.…

AS the days get longer and a tapestry of trembling new leaves and fragile blooms clothes meadows, trees and bushes, Nature’s orchestra begins to play with gusto. There are many places in Europe where you can hear the world reawakening, but here are seven European favourites. Best for the all-day chorus Extremadura Spain Each spring, dulcet trilling, warbling crescendos, melancholic singing and every sound in between fill the plains and crags of Extremadura, one of Europe’s birdwatching hotspots. ‘The combination of birdsong with the glory of wildflowers is like stepping back in time to springtime as it used to be across western Europe,’ says Martin Kelsey, who, with his wife, Claudia, and their son, Patrick, runs Birding Extremadura (www.birdingextremadura.com). The region, he explains, has an astonishing variety of landscapes, each of which has its…

Lord Monson on Kenya ON the King’s Road in the 1970s, there lived a lion cub called Christian, who had been bought from Harrods by a chap called John Rendall and his friend Anthony “Ace” Bourke. He lived in their furniture shop in Chelsea and Rendall drove him around in an open-top car. Rendall and Ace had decided that, for him to have a good life, he ought to be taken back to Kenya and rehabilitated into the wild by George and Joy Adamson of Born Free. I went there in the 1980s and tried to find him. ‘I flew up to the reserve, near the Somali border. It was quite dangerous—the Somalis had attempted to kill George. We went to find Christian, George and I, in a Land Rover and, suddenly,…

WHISPER it: not everyone loves Pimm’s. Everything that goes hand-in-hand with it, absolutely, but the drink itself? Some of us tolerate this sugary suspension of fruit salad in the same way we do soggy sandwiches and picnic chairs that trap your fingers: it’s simply one of the prices of admission for English socialising. But, given the choice, we probably wouldn’t choose to kick things off with a cup of portable wasp-magnet. The good news is that—whether you dislike Pimm’s or you enjoy it, but would sometimes like to try something different—you do have a choice. A huge one, in fact: cast your gaze towards Europe and a whole new world of party-starters opens up. Aperitivi or apéritifs, depending on whether you’re in Italy or France—from the Latin aperire, meaning to open—are…