This was a great place to stay with a big group. We were a part of 9, three families with teenage children. There was plenty of space for us all to come together and have fun, and to hide away and read a book in peace and quite. The pool is a really good size.
Getting to the property is not the easiest - it was difficult to find from the instructions given to us. The drive up to it is very steep and narrow, but once you have navigated it a few times it's absolutely fine.
There are two bedrooms without air conditioning.
There weren't any written instructions to go with the property, so we ahd to work a lot of things out ourselves. The person who is available to help you locally is lovely; very friendly and he coudln't be more helpful, but he isn't the owner and so can't answer all your questions. The owner answered my questions very quickly when I contacted them via vrbo, but a written guide to everything and written instructions about how to find the property would have been much more useful.
The villa is about a 25 min walk outside dolceaqua, and some of this walk is on the main road which is pretty busy. It's only 2 minutes in the car though. Dolceaqua has good local shops for food, a good selection of places to eat and is a really nice place to stay.
We went up into the mountains and visited lots of lovely little villages. Our favourite was Perinaldo, where we had a lovely lunch in Ristorante Bar Au Gaggian - amazing rabbit ravioli!
We went swimming a lot at the beach in Bordighera, which is about 35 min drive away. It's got a rocky beach good for snorkelling and a gravel beach with loungers, cafes etc. It's a slightly smarter seaside town than ventigmiglia.
The food market in ventimiglia is great, well worth shopping from. The Friday market is enormous and also fab if you love hunting for bargains - clothes, bags, belts, food etc.
All in all a great base for exploring the area, both the mountains and the sea.
