Lime-washed fincas on the Alcaidesa coast
Instead of one block of rooms, OKU Andalusia scatters 255 of them — 72 suites among them — through lime-washed fincas under terracotta roofs, arranged like a village that runs from the gardens down to the sand. It opened in July 2025 between Sotogrande and Gibraltar, and it is the first hotel the group has built with children in mind. Nothing was given up to do it: the architecture, the spa, the Nikkei kitchen and the adults-only beach club are all intact, with a kids' club and a jet pool added alongside. We took a standard room. It faced the sea, so we got the sunset every evening.
Four kitchens, one of them worth booking
Nobody here needs to leave for dinner. Breakfast and Italian-leaning evening menus come from The Terrace; To Kima cooks poolside over two services, 12:30–16:30 and 18:30–23:00; The Bodega opens at 18:00 for Andalusian wine and tapas in a sunken courtyard. The one to book is Teyo, where Mark Vaessen writes the Nikkei menus — we ate very well, found dishes we hadn't met before, and the prices match the ambition. The high point of the stay, though, was breakfast: the range of it, and the service around it.
The quiet half: spa, padel, no children at the beach club
Grown-ups get a wing of their own, and it is where OKU's quiet luxury actually sits. The spa covers 2 000 m² and runs from 10:00 to 20:00, with an indoor pool, sauna, steam room and a meditation courtyard; there are two gyms, and yoga, Pilates and sound healing come free, in classes of four or five when we were there. Racquets are provided for the tennis and padel courts. At the shore, the Alma beach club reserves its pool and bar for adults, and Teyo shuts its doors to children at 21:30.
None of that leaves parents stranded, because the middle of the hotel belongs to everybody: the main pool, with To Kima and the bar wrapped around it. The children have their own jet pool, set far enough off that the big one keeps its music and its calm.
Two years old is the threshold
That is when the kids' club will take them — the first OKU has built — and it keeps them until twelve, in age bands, free of charge, from 10:00 to 18:00. Indoors there is a Lego room and a ball pit; outdoors, a timber adventure playground of treehouses and walkways, slides and a splash pool. Under two, you hire a childminder by the hour from 30 €. Our son was six months old in April and too small for all of it. What he got instead: bottles warmed at the counter, his plate and cutlery on the table before we asked, and a cot, a toy monkey and a baby bath set waiting upstairs. We spent the week watching the other half of the hotel in action, and that is the reason we will go back — in a few years, when he can get at it.
