Maria Cano Pintos, 62, has embarked on a new chapter in her life by cultivating an extensive garden around her vacation home in Villanueva de la Vera, a rural area about two hours west of Madrid. After training as a landscape designer in her youth but postponing her career to raise five children, Cano Pintos has now returned to her passion, dedicating herself to shaping the landscape surrounding a distinctive house designed by her sister and brother-in-law, the architects Lucía Cano and José Selgas of the firm SelgasCano.
The house, which occupies about three-quarters of an acre on a gently sloping site, is partially buried into the landscape to blend with its surroundings while benefiting from natural climate control. This design allows the home to stay warm during the winter and cool in the summer without the need for air conditioning, an amenity Cano Pintos and her husband, Julio Callejo González, a retired insurance executive, chose to forgo despite the region’s hot summers and recent wildfire smoke.
SelgasCano, internationally recognized for their vibrant, plant-integrated architectural projects, designed the 3,400-square-foot home to minimize its visual impact on the environment. The structure is divided into two parts: the upper section overlooking a pool contains the master suite and main living areas, while the lower section, facing away from the pool, houses bedrooms and bathrooms for Cano Pintos’s children and grandchildren. The architects drew inspiration from traditional local terraces, incorporating a planted roof punctuated with skylights fashioned from recycled earthenware wine jars sourced from the builder’s family.
The garden reflects Cano Pintos’s commitment to native and adaptive Mediterranean plant species, focusing on heat- and drought-resistant varieties. After the house’s construction, which involved significant earth movement, she planted grapevines near the building to provide seasonal shading—dense foliage in summer and leaf drop in winter to allow sunlight through. The plant selection includes a mix of trees such as oak, ash, pomegranate, quince, orange, fig, and cherry, as well as shrubs and groundcover like thyme, lavender, rosemary, myrtle, and lantana. She has also embraced spontaneous growth from native wildflowers and volunteer plants like broom and rockrose, allowing the garden to evolve in a natural and unmanicured way.
A unique aspect of Cano Pintos’s approach is the integration of natural volunteers alongside carefully selected plants, with the gardener favoring a subtle hand that allows the garden to feel alive and spontaneous. Painted steel trellises made from repurposed construction rebar form curlicue structures designed to support future grapevines and other climbers, enhancing the garden’s lush, intertwined character.
With this project, Cano Pintos has fulfilled a longtime ambition by merging architecture and landscape into a harmonious environment that embraces the local climate, heritage, and biodiversity—creating a living retreat in the countryside that she describes as “living in a garden.”