Samantha Mythen
IT was a hellish year for Rachel McFadden in 2024. In the same month, the local wedding planner was diagnosed with breast cancer and her father faced terminal lung cancer.
While battling her own diagnosis, her father passed away that summer.
Rachel said she was lucky enough to be able to step back from her wedding business, slow down to grieve and spend quality time with her family. “But it was still such a hard year, even though we were able to do all those things,” she said.
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Rachel thought about those faced with a cancer diagnosis who still had to continue working. “I said to my husband: what can we do to help others in this position, those who don’t have the opportunity to take work off like I did?”
She knew of couple Jess and Eric Formby who had married at her company’s wedding venue, Cortijo Rosa Blanca, in 2018. A few years later, their baby girl Arabella was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at just two years old. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy. Rachel rang them and proposed an idea: come and relax at the Cortijo with your friends and family.
She received her own relieving remission statement in January, and shortly after created the Rachel Rose Rainbow Foundation, the name is inspired by Maya Angelou’s poem: “Be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.” Its purpose is to gift families of children facing life-threatening illnesses a holiday respite in Spain and to host a dream wedding day for couples navigating a terminal diagnosis.
The Formby family are looking forward to the sunshine and relaxation October holds for them. It will also be their wedding anniversary. Another family, Justin and Jo Grimshaw, will stay in August with their 15-year-old daughter Evie who has life-limiting illness cerebrovascular disease and is blind.
Through word of mouth, the Foundation hopes to be able to also one day donate a wedding to a couple.
From the UK to Spain
Rachel has been a wedding planner in Costa del Sol for more than 12 years but has called Spain home for the last two decades. She had dreamed of running a wedding business while she worked for Volkswagen as a sales executive in the UK, where she’s from originally.
“On my days off, I’d be driving around the Kent countryside approaching farmers to search for a barn or for a field I could set up a marquee in.”
The dream paused after she moved to Spain. “It wasn’t until I started looking for my own wedding site, I remembered how I used to really want my own wedding venue,” she said. The couple eventually stumbled across a cortico near Benahavis.
“It was very run down, and I approached the owners and put the idea to them that it would make an amazing wedding venue,” she said. “They thought I was crazy. But I did a full refit for them for free in exchange for exclusivity of the venue.”
Within three months, the venue was fully booked for the following year and they had to turn people away.
Her business eventually grew and they took on several more venues to host weddings, including the purchase of their own venue Cortijo Rosa Blanca. They downsized to that one venue after Covid-19 took a toll on the business.
Rachel said the Costa del Sol wedding industry has rallied her Foundation, with many offering their services. A professional photographer will be taking portraits for the two families arriving over summer.
She is encouraging people to donate wedding dresses and suits to the Foundation, to be offered to couples for their big day. The Formbys’ have already chosen to donate their wedding attire to the Foundation for use at a future wedding.
Rachel is currently fundraising to help pay for the two families flights to Spain. She also encouraged people to contact the Foundation if they know of a deserving couple or family.
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