For three consecutive years we ran our senior leadership programme in the same four-star hotel on the outskirts of Madrid. It was convenient, the catering was reliable, and parking was straightforward — which, when you're coordinating eighteen people's diaries, genuinely matters. The programme itself was well-designed: two days, a mix of facilitated sessions and peer group work, focused on how our senior team makes decisions together. The facilitator was excellent. The feedback was consistently good. And yet, every year, within about six weeks of the event, it had quietly faded. People remembered attending it. Very few could tell you what had actually shifted for them.
I'd been turning that over for a while when a colleague mentioned she'd done a team session at a converted farmhouse in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Not a hotel. Not a conference facility. A working property with stone outbuildings, a large shared kitchen, and a terrace that faced west across a valley. She said the group had been different there. More willing to go to difficult places in the conversation. I asked her why she thought that was, and she said she wasn't entirely sure, but that nobody was in a hurry to leave the room and check their phone.
That was enough for me to look into it properly.
Same content, same facilitator, same eighteen people. The only variable was the building — and the building changed everything.
The venue we found — Finca Los Almendros, about seventy-five minutes north of Madrid — wasn't purpose-built for corporate training. There was no AV trolley on standby, no branded notepads on the tables, no hotel staff checking in every forty minutes to see if we needed more coffee. What it had was space: a long stone-floored room that held the group without crowding them, a kitchen where people made their own breakfast, a terrace they could step out to between sessions without walking through a lobby, and no other guests. The property was ours for the two days.
I was more anxious about it in the weeks beforehand than I let on. The CEO asked twice whether we were sure about this. One of the senior team members sent me a message the evening before asking if there would be decent wifi. There would be, I confirmed, though I'd quietly decided that if the days went the way I hoped, nobody was going to care much about the wifi by lunchtime on day one.
They didn't. What changed — and I've thought carefully about how to describe this without overstating it — was the quality of the attention in the room. In the hotel, there was always a low-level awareness of the world outside: the hum of the building, the sound of other events, the ease of slipping back into inbox mode during a break. At the farmhouse, the breaks were walks to the end of the garden or coffees on the terrace with a view of the sierra. There was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. The group settled into the programme in a way I hadn't seen in the previous three years.
Previous years · HotelGeneric conference setup, reset each eveningBreaks spent in lobby or at laptopsOther hotel guests and events in buildingCatered meals, formal dining roomProgramme faded within six weeksYear four · FarmhouseSpace the group shaped and owned for two daysBreaks on the terrace, walks in the groundsExclusive use — no other guests or eventsShared kitchen, group cooked dinner togetherStill referenced in team meetings fourteen months later
The dinner on the first evening is worth mentioning separately. In the hotel, dinner was served at 8pm in a private dining room — pleasant enough, but structured in a way that kept people slightly in professional mode. At the farmhouse, the facilitator suggested the group cook together. Half of them had never met each other outside a meeting room. By the time they sat down to eat, something had loosened. Two conversations started over the chopping board that continued into the formal sessions the next day and, as far as I can tell, are still going.
I'm not making the case that every corporate training should happen in a farmhouse. The logistics are genuinely more demanding, the accessible-by-public-transport question is real, and there are programmes where a well-run conference facility is exactly right. But I am making the case that the setting is a variable worth taking seriously — not as a perk, but as a condition that either supports or undermines the work you've designed.
We've booked Finca Los Almendros again for this autumn. The CEO didn't ask twice.
