About
What we look for
Most places to stay are somewhere to sleep between the things you actually came for. We look for the opposite: places in Europe where the building, the grounds or the water is the reason to come, and where two or three days spent on the property is the point of the week.
The Douro at Valença do Douro
Joseolgon, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Every house here has a one-line answer to "this is the house with ______" — and the ones that don't have one are turned down, however well they photograph.
The trips these houses make possible are the slow kind. A group arrives on Friday and doesn't get in the car again until Monday. Someone cooks in a kitchen built for eight. Someone else swims before anybody is up. An afternoon goes nowhere in particular, which was the point.
The name comes from the casone — the reed-and-timber huts of the Venetian lagoon, the same family as Istria's stone kažun. A small building put up so someone could stay close to the thing they came for. Say it ka-so-NEH-ta.
A feature is earned against a published standard, and it comes down again if a house stops meeting it.
Where a stay can be booked with Casoneta, the page says so. Where it cannot, the page sends you straight to the owner's own booking page.
Who writes this
Casoneta is written by Nick Biggs. I have been to fifty-six countries, and somewhere in the middle of them the travelling changed — from a backpack and the next bus to going somewhere for the house itself. These days I travel with my wife and our two daughters, and we pick the house first: the building, the water off its steps, the vines at the door. The rest of the trip arranges itself around it.
I moved to Portugal in 2021, and I run a short-term rental in Denver, Colorado — so I read a listing the way an operator does, not just a guest. Casoneta is the list I keep of houses I would cross a border for, each checked against a published standard, with the awkward facts left in.
Casoneta is published from Portugal by Nick Biggs.
How we choose
One question, then three kinds of house, then five things checked on every one. Most of what we look at doesn't get in — that is the whole point of reading us rather than a search box.
Ask us about a stay
Ask about a house, ask which one suits a particular group, or tell us we've got something wrong. If a page is out of date, say so and we will fix it or take it down.
Own or manage a house you think belongs here? That has its own page. For owners.