Joan Gallagher and her husband, John, used to enjoy weekend walks through Spain’s Priorat wine region, driving out from their home in Sitges, Catalonia. They had moved to Spain from Ireland in 2001; two years ago they opened a hotel in the former creamery next door to where they used to stay.
Their four boys “were grown up and doing their own thing. I thought, ‘I don’t want to retire – don’t want to sit back on my laurels and do nothing. John and I like to keep busy,” says Joan, 66.
It took three years, taking in the pandemic, to renovate “a six-storey building: I can’t tell you how many tonnes of rubble we were taking out.” But the neighbours were brilliant and excited to have a new business in the village. The Gallaghers got their licence to operate on Christmas Eve, 2021. Their first paying customer turned up on Christmas Day.
That was a bit of a challenge given that Joan is “very particular. I want everything perfect all of the time.” But one week later, by New Year’s Eve, all six apartments in the hotel were full. Joan had never worked in hospitality, aside from occasional bed and breakfasting in Sitges after two sons had left home. In Ireland, where she grew up, she worked in a bank. John had a construction business. Did such a seismic change feel intimidating?
“Over my life, I have experienced a lot more scary things,” she says. Such as? “Oh, well, you know. Living in Ireland!”
Her father was a detective “and life at times could be worrying.” She was born in Ballyshannon, Donegal, “quite near the border with Northern Ireland. So it was that kind of scariness but also – I think it’s more the oppression I felt.”
Because the family was Catholic, she says, “we lived in a permanent state of guilt. Everything was a sin. I couldn’t bear it. My sister is gay and is married to a woman.” And, says Joan, when their parents split up 40 years ago, four months before she and John got married, she felt outside the norms again. “My mother was devastated. But none of her friends came to visit. They didn’t know what to do, what to say. This had never happened to anybody they knew.”
A year after her mother died, in 1999, “I woke up one morning and I said to myself, ‘You know, I’m free now.’ I knew there was a world outside this. I wanted the boys to experience another kind of life than rural Ireland.”
The next summer, they all headed off in a Winnebago to northern Spain for a month. The following year, Gallagher and John explored places to move to, and settled on Sitges. “I felt very comfortable there. I felt very safe. It was a lovely town to rear a family.”
The boys were eight, nine, 12 and 15. “I told them: ‘We are going to live in a town called Sitges. And it is the gay capital of Europe. Isn’t this wonderful? And your aunt is gay!’” None of the family spoke Spanish or Catalan. It took two years to feel at home, but Joan says “once the boys were settled, I was settled.”
A short stroll from their apartment hotel, the Gallaghers have their vineyard up and running. No grapes had grown on it for 12 years. Now they are coaxing 2,000 litres of wine from them.
“From my kitchen window and even from the sofa in my living room, I look out. All the vineyards are bordered with almond trees and in February they are a mass of pink. Vines and almonds and hills … At least 10 times a day I look out my window and get goose bumps. I still get them and I still love it,” Joan says. “I get that feeling even on a tough day, I look out that window and go, Yes. Yep. Our roots are here.”
