I was four years old when my maternal grandparents, Carmen and Luis Delgado de Robles, built their beautiful big summer house on the Spanish coast. They had seven children altogether. Their main home was in Madrid, but as the grandchildren started to come along, they decided to build a place where the whole family – including all my uncles, aunts and cousins – could spend the summer together.

The house is between Valencia and Ali-cante, just inland from Javea, about 10 minutes’ walk from the sea. I have spent 26 or 27 summers there now. Sometimes, there would be more than 40 of us staying.

It is a gorgeous L-shaped house on two floors, in a very Spanish, Valencian style. It looks rural – terracotta on the outside, with a covered walkway all the way around – but is contemporary inside, because my grandmother was a lover of interior design. She was always trying to find the latest ceramic tiles and other original things from the local area.

The ground floor is open-plan, with a huge living room.

There was a wonderful but faded 13th-century tapestry on one wall, opposite a stunning contemporary painting. My grandmother was a great lover of the arts: one of my wedding presents was a painting of hers by Freixanes, which used to hang in the entrance.

There is a beautiful terrace covered with a straw roof, where we always ate lunch and dinner. Everybody had to be at the table, and we were not allowed to be wet or in our swimming costumes. My grandfather sat at the head of the table, with the rest of us seated according to age, the tiny ones at the corners. There were always three courses, and we had to eat everything – if you didn’t like it, tough. My grandmother was a fantastic cook and she had help from Eduardo, who had come to Spain from the Philippines.

After lunch, the older members of the family would have coffee and a tertulia (Spanish for a big talk or discussion). I remember hearing the raised voices. When we were older, we would join in a card game called mus. My great-grandfather was the founder of the company that produced the cards.

As more grandchildren came along, my grandmother decided to dig under the house to create a basement for the kids. It was like a bunker, very humid. We all stayed down there, and we slept in different beds every night. My parents were dancers and ran a dancing school in Gran Canaria. Once my older brother, Yuri, my sister, Nadia, and I had all started ballet, my parents insisted that we did class for an hour a day after we had been on holiday for a few weeks. They put a barre in the basement for us. Last summer, I was exercising down there again – the only thing was, my leg touched the ceiling!

The top floor was my grandparents’ space. They had huge windows overlooking the patio and pool on one side, and fields on the other, so they could see the sunrise and sunset every day. It was a bit like a forbidden city upstairs, but we all used to go up there to say good night. My grandfather had chocolate biscuits and liquorice, which were a bit of a bribe for us.

The whole place was heaven for kids – and my grandpa was the biggest kid of all. His first four grandchildren were all boys, so he built a little medieval castle for them in the field below the house. It was a real castle: on two floors, with secret tunnels, water all around and towers with narrow slits for shooting arrows through. Then I was born – the first girl – and I was spoilt rotten. My grandfather worried that I might become a bit of a tomboy, so he built a doll’s house in the field as well. It was just one storey, but big enough for two or three kids, and it had a stove that worked, so I could cook. When I went back last summer, I thought: “How did I ever fit in here?” The whole place was like a theme park just for us.

The large swimming pool, which was always boiling hot, is where all the cousins – and there are 25 of us now – learnt to swim. To teach us, my grandpa used to throw us in the water. He was quite brutal: when I was five, he took me down to his boat, fastened on some water skis and told me to hold on. Today, parents would be much more careful.

My grandmother died three years ago, and my grandfather a year later. Now the house has been put up for sale for £1.1m. When I wonder what I will do when I finish dancing, and what life will bring me, there is one thing I am sure of: I want to keep that unity within the family that my grandparents managed. It was so important to them to have us all together. Interview by Lynne Greenwood

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