The House That Called...
And the Woman Who Answered
How three derelict buildings in a forgotten corner of the eastern Algarve became one of the world's most celebrated yoga retreats — and what it really took to get there.
There are stories you plan, and stories that happen to you.
Casa Fuzetta is emphatically the second kind.
Tucked into the narrow streets of Olhão, a working fishing town in the eastern Algarve that most visitors to southern Portugal drive straight past, Casa Fuzetta is, on the surface, a beautifully restored retreat. A place of yoga and meditation, of creative work and long shared meals, of conversations that run late into the warm Portuguese night. In 2024, Condé Nast Traveller named it one of the best yoga retreats in the world. Travel + Leisure, Elle and many others have said similar things.
But awards tell you what a place is. They don't tell you how it got there.
For that, you need to go back to September 2013, to a woman stepping off a plane at Faro Airport for the first time in her life; and, somewhere between the gate and passport control, leaving her rational mind behind.
The Sensible Person Who Did a Mad Thing
Tara is, by her own description, a city girl. Born and raised in London. Cerebral by profession. At the time she flew in to Faro airport, she was working more than full time as the CEO of Jamie Oliver's media group, used to running on strategy, logic and a tightly managed diary. Portugal was not on her radar. She had never even been before.
Her husband Jonathan, Tod, as she calls him, had been once, when he was seven, which doesn’t count. But earlier that year, a food and travel writer friend had taken him to Olhão, and Tod had come home clutching lemons and chickpeas, waxing lyrical about the market. Tara noted, with a wife's eye for detail, that he had never, in all the years she had known him, willingly eaten a chickpea.
Something was clearly up.
“I still don’t know how I found myself in this story.”
They went for a weekend. What Tara found in Olhão was not the kind of beauty that announces itself. No manicured promenade, no picture-postcard harbour. Instead: faded merchant mansions alongside cubist fishermen's houses. A waterfront of cafés and old men. A town that was still recovering from the economic crash of 2008, visibly bruised but carrying itself with a quiet, unsentimental pride. The community was almost entirely Portuguese. Nobody was going to fawn over you. Tara loved it immediately.
Then there was the building.
The Building That Shouldn’t Have Said Yes
Tod had spotted it; not the first building his contact had shown him, which he dismissed as too small, but the larger one next door, glimpsed over a party wall. It had a courtyard; a chapel-like structure with stained glass windows, and a rooftop with views across the Olhão roofscape to the islands beyond.
The building was deeply derelict. Squatters had been in residence, with large and intimidating dogs. Every surface bore decades of neglect. On the facade, there was a plaque in honour of Dr. Carlos Fuzeta — a late 19th century lawyer, an advocate for the rights of local fishermen, philosopher and philanthropist. Tod, a barrister who had long been on what Tara calls a 'spiritual journey', felt the connection immediately.
And Tara, despite herself, felt it too.
The part of the building they could access — most of it was blocked by the squatters and their dogs — included a small interior space that would later become the meditation room. Even in its ruined state, in a building that smelt of decades of abandonment, the peace in the room called to them.
“You walked in and there was peace. An extraordinary sense of calm and protection. I think that is when and where I fell under the spell of the house.”
They found their way up to the roof - not easily, given the state of the stairs; and stood under blue Portuguese skies looking out across a town that had no idea what was about to happen to it. Retreats, Tara thought. Small weddings. Photo shoots. She was already trying to make the numbers work.
She said yes.
Three Buildings, Sixteen Strangers, and a Wall of Tigers
What followed was not a smooth renovation story. It was something stranger and more interesting than that.
The offers went in on two buildings and were left, as Tara puts it, 'to the universe'. Then, two months later, Tara was climbing the steps to board a flight to Australia — she was preparing for a Jamie Oliver tour — when the lawyers called. Both vendors had agreed. Both would sell. But the contracts had to be signed within seven days.
Tara was about to disappear for 24 hours into the sky. Tod, with uncharacteristic timing, picked up the phone on the first ring and mentioned that his court case the following day had just come out of the diary. He could fly to Portugal in the morning.
By the time Tara touched down in Sydney, they owned two derelict buildings in a country they barely knew. She had not been present for the signing.
The squatters had gone by the time they returned for completion. They had also, with considerable thoroughness, taken everything; including, apparently, the last stone off the outside staircase. Tara was oddly grateful. Friends who have since restored similar buildings, where the interiors had been left untouched, found themselves unwilling to make big changes. The squatters had given Casa Fuzetta something unexpected: freedom.
A third building followed, a narrow sliver next door, occupied by a drug dealer with a hoarding issue and another frightening dog. Acquiring this building took considerably longer. The property turned out to be jointly owned by approximately sixteen descendants of the original owners, scattered across the globe, most of whom had never met each other and had no idea that they even owned a share of a small crumbling building in Olhão.
While the lawyers worked to locate them, Tod's spiritual advisors - the 'spooky crew', as Tara affectionately calls them - came to walk the buildings and read the energy. On the first-floor wall between Casa Fuzetta and the building next door were painted a pair of enormous, aggressively coloured tigers. The advisors looked at them. The tigers, they said, were guarding the wall. Paint them out, and the path will open.
The builders thought this was completely mad, but they did what was asked of them. The tigers were painted away, and just one week later, the lawyers called. Enough descendants had been located. The court had agreed. The third building was theirs.
What Adversity Actually Gave Them
The renovation itself was not without its challenges. The architect they had identified early on fell through. A moment that felt, at the time, like disaster. Tara and Tod were in shock, adrift, wondering how to proceed.
But the loss turned out to be a gift, in the same way that the damage caused by the squatters had been. Free of the constraints they hadn't even known they were about to accept, they found a different architectural team, experienced, award-winning, and arrived at by one of those Casa Fuzetta coincidences: a friend living with them at the time happened to know someone whose Portuguese husband worked in the restoration of old buildings. Two degrees of separation. The architects came east, past Faro, to a town they would normally have driven straight through.
They came. They saw the vision. And the work began in earnest.
People often overestimate what they can do in a day — and underestimate what they can do in a decade.
That is true of Casa Fuzetta, and it is true of Olhão itself. The town that Tara first encountered in 2013, bruised from the economic crash, overlooked, a little down at heel, has been quietly, steadily transforming. New public gardens. A revitalised waterfront. Restaurants that raise their game year after year; family-owned, affordable, confident. The eastern Algarve's great foodie secret.
Casa Fuzetta sits at the centre of this current, though it didn't create it. The pull was always there; in the light, the stillness, the pride of the people. The house simply gives it somewhere to land.
A Place That Holds the Space
What Casa Fuzetta offers - in the meditation room with its ancient stained glass, on the kitchen terrace in the evening light, on the rooftop under open sky - is harder to name than a list of amenities.
Tara describes it as a move from fear to trust. Not a dramatic conversion. Not an overnight transformation. But a gradual, real, sometimes quietly uncomfortable shift: a willingness to follow intuition rather than a timetable. To let the next thing arrive rather than forcing it into a spreadsheet.
It is what happened to Tara herself, crossing from head to heart without quite knowing she was doing it. A city girl who parked her sensible brain at passport control and came home with three buildings, and something she couldn't argue with.
Three derelict buildings. A woman who had never been to Portugal. No plan, no experience, no obvious reason why any of it should work.
And yet: one of the best yoga retreats in the world. A community of guests who return year after year. A house that keeps drawing out the best of the people who pass through it.
That’s not branding. That’s not hospitality. That’s everyday magic — and it turns out everyday magic, in the right place, is enough.
If you would like to deep dive into the Casa Fuzetta - House of Stories podcast. We invite you to explore the current two series via the links below.