ALMUDENA was thinking about her forthcoming wedding. Pedro was wondering when his 25-year-old son was going to leave home. Gracia was worried about her 11-year-old daughter, while Eva still couldn’t decide whether she wanted children at all. But what all of them had in common was a desire to improve their English.

Welcome to Englishtown at Valdelavilla, an abandoned village of 18th-century stone cottages in the Sierra de Alcarama, 300km northeast of Madrid, which is part tourist attraction, part language school, part exercise in group therapy.

The idea is simple. Take 20 Spaniards who need to use English professionally, who have studied the language but have little contact with native speakers. Take 20 volunteers from the English-speaking world. Throw them all together for a week, in a remote village, and get them to talk English to each other all day.

The Spaniards enjoy total immersion in the language as it is spoken on the streets of London, Chicago and Sydney. The English speakers — whose ages ranged from 21 to 60 and who included teachers, students and a jazz singer — get a free holiday in a beautiful part of Spain, food and wine, and an insight into the country.

The core of the programme is a series of one-to-one conversations, an hour at a time for up to six hours a day. This sounds formal, but it wasn’t. You could go for a walk, chat on the terrace or do anything you liked as long as you spoke English. Subjects ranged from the complexities of Basque nationalism to the difficulties of being a single mother.

After a few days together, we started to open up. People who a few days earlier had been strangers were suddenly telling each other about their relationships and sharing their problems and secrets.

If this all sounds a bit too intense, there were chances to relax. Much of the time was spent walking in pairs, on a beautiful path through the valley, looking out for wild flowers and watching the vultures overhead. One day, we went for a walk to the village of Castillejo, abandoned in the 1960s, now ruined and a glimpse of what Valdelavilla would have been without restoration.

As the days went by, groups of friends started to form as people got together to play cards or pop into the nearby town of San Pedro Manrique for a beer. Each afternoon, there was time for a siesta, when people would sleep or lie in the shade chatting — no Spanish allowed. Mealtimes were late, with two Anglos and two Spaniards to each table, the conversation usually flowing as freely as the wine.

By the end of the week, our group had begun to resemble a real Spanish village, with its gossip and jealousies, romances and affairs. People brought chairs out on to the cobbled streets at night to chat under the stars, just like they do all over Spain, only here they were talking in English.

As for me, the hard work was worth the rewards. A hundred hours of English conversation may seem a high price to pay for a free holiday, but I learnt more about Spain than I would have in six months travelling the country. I came home with an address book full of new Spanish friends — all for the cost of a cheap flight to Madrid.

NEED TO KNOW

Englishtown takes place at Valdelavilla between May and October. Participants are collected by minibus in Madrid, and all transport, accommodation, food and wine are free. Further details: 00 34 902 103737, www.vaughanvillage.com. EasyJet (0905 8210905, www.easyjet.com) flies to Madrid from Gatwick, Luton, Liverpool and Bristol. Return fares from £41.

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