Velez de Benaudalla

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Thinking of moving to the Costa Tropical? #LivingInSpain

I’ve blogged intermittently about the move to Spain over the last few years and two emails in the last month as a result so (a) Velez de Benaudalla (and / or Granada province) is becomingly increasingly popular for those looking to move to Spain, no surprise there, it’s lovely and (b) I could save your time by blogging about moving here.

Lessee if I can come up with ten useful facts rather than scattered over six years of blogs  . . .

1.      Learn Spanish. Or start learning Spanish, it takes a while. You can’t start soon enough. Wish I’d been able to do it at school, wish I’d put in an hour a day from the minute I fell in love with the house, wish I’d not assumed I could pick it up easily when I got here. I go to the local free Spanish classes, I watch TV series dubbed into Spanish, and training videos, and buy kiddie books, and my Spanish Is still stuck at pidgin level and frankly that’s getting a little embarrassing six years down the line, even with Covid19 interrupting play (and lessons, and interaction) for part of the time.  Yes there are English-speakers and expats from Europe who speak English (and increasingly fluent Spanish, sigh) dotted about so socially it isn’t essential. I’ll never, ever, be fluent but every time I suddenly understand what I’m hearing (or being asked) is a real buzz. The more Spanish you speak, the more integrated you’ll feel, and that’s priceless.    

2.      Go through professionals for everything official – conveyancing, tax returns, etc – the Spanish can sometimes seem to be laidback about bureaucracy, but when they aren’t, they aren’t sympathetic with those who have tried to cut corners or sidestep requirements. Not worth it, no matter how many people you meet who will tell you it’s a mug’s game to be legal, they’ve never jumped through a hoop in their life. Good for them. I had to live here and work here in a fairly public arena and I didn’t have the choice but over the years I’ve been very glad I chose to be scrupulously legal.

3.      Translate it! Yes, some communications seem to go on and on and on and yes you’ve got the gist:  but have you? Some words are misleading. (I got a text in 2021 telling me to report to the centro deportivo on x date, x time. I really thought I was going to be deported. Actually, it was a sports (deportes) centre being used for vaccinations.) Every document is miles longer than it would be in English, because the same facts or findings or regulations are repeated again and again. More alarmingly, not always repeated exactly. Bits get updated and other bits weren’t amended.  An official document can literally actually contradict itself. Be tactful pointing out the contradiction. Offence can be taken.

4.      Prices and expenses in Spain vs, say, UK –  swings and roundabouts. Better food, lower prices. Income tax is higher. Electricity is pretty expensive.  On the whole the euro goes further than the pound, unless you’re addicted to imported products and willing to pay over the odds. Once you’re a pensioner you can get a Spanish health card linked to your S1 (or equivalent from any other country of origin with a similar arrangement to the UK) and use the state health system but otherwise you’ll need to arrange for medical aid. Medical aid can be expensive, but some people do choose to have both. Housing, as every other country, depends where you want to buy. Budget for 10% on top of the house price to cover all the related conveyancing costs.

5.      Not everyone adapts to Spain seamlessly and not every move is a happy-ever-after. The Spanish are not hungry for extranjeros who want to turn the country into a home-from-home-plus-sun. Renting first rather than buying is not, however, always an option. Spain is not the only country with an okupa (squatter) problem, but it is enough of one that property owners are not terribly thrilled by the prospect of tenants. One French couple I know started offering a year’s rental in advance and if anything that got them more likely to be eyed askance.

6.     Fitting in – Spain is an immensely proud country with thousands of years of history and traditions. You respect that, bienvenido. You don’t like their attitudes, be sure they won’t like yours. They may smile and nod if you represent profit but under that they’re granite.

7.       Oh, and macho. Just saying. Scratch a traditional Spaniard, especially if you’re female, and you’ll find a man who will unhesitatingly come to your aid if you are in trouble, unquestioningly uphold your right to indulge in female behaviour, even be a virago, but will never truly believe you are capable of making your own decisions in a masculine-dominated world. How could you? You’re a woman.

8.      So much for attitudes … the nuts and bolts of the move, then. You’ll have six months after you move here to get yourself sorted, although frankly it’s a rare official who will hold you rigidly to that. Get your car, if you bring it, matriculated fairly quickly and certainly before your current MoT or equivalent runs out. You’ll need an NIE to buy a house, but also to present on nearly every official occasion or as proof you are here legally, and a padron from the local council to prove your address. After six months, if you’re staying permanently, you need to register as an official resident, then switch your driver’s licence for a Spanish one. It’s pretty straightforward to get a TIE photocard and they’re becomingly increasingly useful. Bureaucracy WILL drive you nuts. Regulations change, and change again. There’s so much paperwork, and it is asked for so often. I have my entire official life, including copies of passports and other documents as well as originals, in a file I carry every time I have to go near a bureaucrat, because you never know what could be asked for. If I ever lose it, I won’t even need to jump off a cliff. So far is Spain is concerned, if I lose it, I no longer exist and I might as well be dead.  

9.      Talking of dead, get your will sorted, especially when you buy a house. Spanish law is different, and a will drawn in another country will simply not cut it here.  Your heirs are in for a long drawn-out and expensive time of it if you don’t.

10.   Get your funeral sorted, or ensure your insurance has Spanish-friendly funeral cover.  If you die (I mean really die, not just lose your file) you should legally be cremated or alternative arrangements confirmed within 24 hours – okay, maybe 48 on weekends. If you haven’t prearranged the cardboard box, or that matter the flock of doves and the hired mourners, and aren’t carrying your funeral card,  you will get one or the other and either way it will cost your heirs a lot of money and Heaven help them if they don’t speak Spanish because decisions are needed NOW and there’s a great deal of bureaucracy about to crash down on their heads.

Oh, and read the Tales of the Alhambra. A Spanish guest staying here was shocked that I hadn’t, and she was right. It re-sets the way you look at everyone and everything about you.

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Costa Tropical in winter – guests from barely-20 to 70-something #CasaExcentrico

I haven’t done a blog about guests for a while since all was quiet from mid-November to January. Well, not quiet.  Some fairly hectic winter-proofing in the guest rooms was required. Thing was, when I first listed the rooms on Airbnb and HomeAway in May last year my first (and for a while only) response was from a Belgian couple who wanted the front room for 3 months starting February. That was, frankly, terrifying. The guest rooms, like most older Spanish houses, had shuttered windows, but no sissy namby-pamby modernities like glass,  what for you need glass,  is a bedroom, you only need shutters? The newly created guest living room boasted a kettle and open toaster and not a lot else.

My wanting-to-self-cater Belgians lit a bit of a rocket: having not thought about winter bookings at all, I had to refocus towards the can’t-afford-to-turn-down 3 month booking. Turned out, purest luck. Radiators were snapped up all summer whenever I saw a bargain, a sink was plumbed into the living room during a gap between bookings, a two-plate electric hob, pots and pans, were added to the tiny guest oven in the pantry cupboard. My local wand-waving DIY friend Nick, who performs miracles as standard, worked out a way of adding glass to the original shutters in the front room just in time for me to accept a January booking from a young American lass on her way to a 5 month teaching post on the coast. She chose to stay here for a week while looking for an apartment near the school because I spoke English, and she could therefore ask endless questions, some of which I could answer, and vent hilariously about the frustrations of Spain vs America. Like the day she was to report at her new school – she caught the Velez coach into Motril, then hopped on the coast bus to her destination. The driver either forgot, or hadn’t understood, where she wanted to get off. She was swept past and to the next stop, 8 km further. He shrugged, and told her to catch the next bus back. There aren’t many buses on the coastal road . . . the next was due in an hour and a half. The taxi company she phoned refused to travel so far. Almost in tears she tried to flag down drivers heading that way but (oh how times have changed) has never hitched in her life, so instead of sticking out her thumb she waved. Drivers waved back, and kept going.

She also had expected Spain to be hot hot hot all the time so her only warm piece of clothing was her jacket and the radiators and heaters I’d bought were pressed into urgent service. It is sunny nearly all the time but temperatures drop sharply overnight in mid-winter and can hover just above zero.  However her general attitude was incredibly positive, she was a fun guest to have, and we bundled up well and traipsed off to the tiny local evening parade of the Kings on January 6th. (The third king was caught up in a photoshoot off to the side in this snap)

Sara and 2 of 3 kings

There was enough of a gap after her stay to get the back room’s windows glazed, in time for my first actual English guest (I’ve had guests who live in England, but they were Polish) who was scoping out the Granada area for his 50th birthday celebrations next year. He and his friends are into golf and ski-ing so he was out and about every day testing golf-courses in one direction or shooting up into the Sierra Nevada in the other so I only ever saw him as a fleeting shadow past the study window on his way out or back upstairs to recover from the day’s exertions.

The day after he left it was, finally, time for my game-changing Belgians to arrive. Over the months since their original booking the 3 months had changed to 6 weeks, then shrunk finally down to 10 days, and I had begun to wonder if the booking would ever happen at all. I had extra blankets, a heater in each room and two in the living room, and of course everything they could need to self-cater. Guess what, they never cooked a single meal at home, they too were out and about every day.

laugh

They’ve bought off plan along the coast and said they’d had a wonderful time and would be back so they can monitor progress on their apartment. He came down the first night to ask how much I charged for anything they took from the fridge or pantry (no no, on the house) and then a little later to say the lights had blown, he had now unplugged two of the four heaters they had taken into the bedroom and could I show him the fusebox? He was wearing only a string vest (in February) so it obviously wasn’t exactly freezing. However they said in their review (according to Google translate) that the “electrics weren’t clean”, (without mentioning they had overloaded them, grrr), and had a general whinge. Wish they had done that the other way round. People are odd. And what on earth do I (politely) say if they meant it about wanting to come back??

Georges et Colette 2 March 2019

Some guests want to chat, some are completely self-sufficient. The original plan was to attract writers but apart from my first guest, working on his thesis, the majority have been, oddly enough, teachers (including the Belgians) and all have been out and about most of the time, none more so than the Dublin cyclist who appeared next. He was extraordinary, not only cycling merrily up to villages like Trevélez (1476m above sea-level up a road so steep I had been hyperventilating in a car) but bringing back fistfuls of beach-stones for the atrium when he did coastal rides. He’d also bring one of the local wines down to the atrium of an evening to chat about the day. In a week he learned way more about every village, vineyard and smokery in a 40 kilometre radius than I have learned in 15 months, which is a little embarrassing.

Will March 8 2019

This area is big with cyclists, one is forever dodging them on the hills or having heart attacks rounding sharp bends to find groups of them taking up most of the road. My next booking, after the refurbishment break, is a couple of German cyclists, at this rate I may need to plan in a neat cycle rack for the hallway.

I booked myself off teaching for 2 days, planning a lazy weekend which turned instead into a rush for a last minute booking from a Madrid couple for the weekend, but they aren’t exactly intrusive – up at 11 am and off to explore Velez, and I know they plan to explore the Lecrin valley and Alpujarras while they’re here. He speaks about as much English as I do Spanish, she has no English at all, so we limp along in bilingual confusion – they did appall me en route by asking via whatsapp, in Spanish, for directions, Google Translate don’t let me down now! My spellcheck was a curse, trying firmly to change every word as I hastily typed but they made it and sent a polite whatsapp from outside  – “estamos en la puerta”, we are at the door. The  equivalent of chapping at a door in Spain is usually to lean on the doorbell while simultaneously hammering on the door itself so I’m guessing they didn’t want to rouse the house so late at night in case it was the wrong place. Note to self – get a sign for the front door.

It’s been a lively start to the year already with spring on its way, I’ve shed the fleece for dog-walking already and will shortly be packing away the radiators and hauling out the standing fans instead … two years ago I had just seen the house for the first time and was in a wistful wouldn’t-it-be-nice-don’t-be-silly reverie. Life stores up some very odd surprises.

cool

 

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The end of the beginning – aka, el final del principio

Last Saturday, 5/5,  I had a small party – I’ve been invited to several since I got here, so it was a chance to return hospitality, but more importantly it marked the end of the beginning, a target date to have things ready, all the rubble cleared. I moved in on 3rd October and I was carrying the last bags of debris to the town bins at 2 in the morning six months later.  It was a long slog!

I’m no cook, and my renovations have provided a kitchen smaller than either my home office or my bathroom. The catering was the simplest – a picnic  theme, an assortment of help-yourself fillings and a range of fresh breads from the bread van. I pre-warned him on Friday in my best Spanish – every day I buy two 8 inch rolls (at 90c for both,  the easiest and cheapest way to do lunches for myself and buddy / builder Nick) and on Friday I said fluently “mañana cinco y rosca y baguette” (tomorrow five, and 8 inch bagels, and everyone knows baguette, right?)

I didn’t add ‘por favor’ because I have a complex about that, we Brits are known as por favors because we say it too often, the Spanish find it hilarious.  My Spanish is still terrible, in part because the local dialect cuts the ends off words so learning ‘proper’  Spanish  doesn’t help much. Even something as simple as buenos dias, here, is pronounced ‘born-dia’

So that was the base catering, the dozen guests brought tapas-type items and quiche and dips, and in the end it was quite a spread, and a lot of fun.  The grass matting was still being laid until 9 pm the night before, and I was still frantically tidying the last bits when they arrived promptly at 2, help, they live here and they don’t keep Spanish time??

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It was only when they left that I could, for the first time in six months, savour the sheer pleasure of looking at the atrium. It’s a long narrow house with a long narrow atrium / terrace and when that’s empty, it catches the heart and the imagination – well, it caught mine.  On the 3rd of October I unpacked the camper van into it and around a week later my furniture and boxes arrived and near-filled it and ever since it has been the heart of the building operations and has looked absolutely horrible for six months.  Some day (phase three) it will be tiled properly again but in the meantime I’m loving the grass!

terry pic atrium

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In a way the terrace photos below illustrate the six months best, but perhaps that’s only because it was the last job finished. The terrace was a series of long shallow steps (the first photo is at their worst, from the top looking down). Now there is a levelled section big enough to hold a table and chairs for sundowners, with the ‘welcoming arms’ curved retaining wall a nostalgic flashback to my childhood.  The plumbing to the laundry is well old so we carefully built in new piping so that if or when the original pipes spring a leak, connecting a new supply won’t mean digging the whole thing up again.

So now I’m basically ready for guests. The trick is sourcing the writers, walkers, cyclists, hikers, poke-around-exploring travellers who want accommodation in a typical Spanish town near the beaches of the Costa Tropical and Granada and the Sierra Nevada in a slightly quirky house. No problem, eh?

Velez without powerlines

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Turns out, my recent ex was born for just one reason  – who knew?

I just finished re-reading the entire Belgariad, having taken one of the ten books as part of my camper library. David Eddings says almost in passing of a couple of minor characters that they were born because they were needed to be in the right place at the right time to perform a simple task.   Well, we’ve all created characters like that, at the time I nodded respectfully at the way he explained them into the story and carried on reading.

In the complicated tangle of my own life story, I had a long-distance relationship – gee, couple of years ago now, doesn’t time fly? And he lived in a permanently-hot part of Spain and was coming to Scotland for two weeks in December and I thought oh help this poor guy will freeze and I bought a fluffy-lined soft thick jersey with a fluffy-lined hood. Much appreciated and it kept him toasty and he left it in Scotland for his next winter trip. I borrowed it a couple of times myself when I had to walk the dog on particularly cold days in Scotland, and when I packed for my own move to Spain this year I shrugged and threw it in.  You never knew, I might be whizzing up the nearby Sierra Nevada to admire the snow and then it could be very handy.

So glad I did, the weather here in Velez de Benaudalla has thrown in an unexpected, uncharacteristic cold snap, and I have lived in it for the last three days. So it seems that entire relationship – his entire reason for being born – was to provide me with the kind of jersey I would never have bought for myself.

Okay he was probably also indirectly responsible for me being here at all, because without the trips to Spain to be with him I’d never have thought of moving here myself, so really his life wasn’t wasted at all. I shall have to let him know, everyone likes to know they had an important reason for being born.

grin

 

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Ja – no. Aye – no. Si!

Ja Aye Si

I’ve just noticed my Twitter account describes me as a Saffer who has been in Scotland so long I say aye instead of ja . . .  oh dear. Now I’m having to say si. I’d only just reached the point where I could follow an entire conversation between two Scots.

On the bright side, I did learn to follow an entire conversation between animated, even arguing, Scots, even when they were talking politics or football, and it took a mere fifteen years. Spanish has to be a doddle after that, right?

The Spanish do talk ever so fast. I had a wonderful plumber come in to quote some of the necessary work on my house, and he scorned the simple tried-and-true English method ‘speak slower and louder’. He fixed me with a gimlet eye and waved his hands a lot and talked around 180 words a minute and willed me to understand.  My lovely Dutch neighbour, who recommends him unreservedly, does speak Spanish and she came along too and did a running translation. It all got quite hectic, they were both completely thrown off their stride if I interrupted. I didn’t interrupt often, mainly when he decided to move a door, and I squawked in protest.  I don’t know what he has against doors. If I have one in the middle of a wall, he wants it nearer the corner, and vice versa.  No, no, no, entiendo? I wave my hands around with the best of them, it is surprisingly effective.  I say entiendo a lot (well, usually no entiendo) and no hablo Español, I say that a lot too. The village has taken my education in hand, when I point hopefully at something in a shop they carefully say the name, then wait expectantly for me to repeat it.  Talk about every day a school day.

Things have moved swiftly since my last blog. The pets and I left Scotland on the 27th of August, rolled out of the Chunnel on 2nd September,  drove erratically down France (getting lost quite often) and then Spain, where it should have been easy – if the sun is on your windscreen, I was told patiently, you are going in the right direction. If not, turn around until it is.  Stop when you reach the coast. Simple.

By the time we did zigzag our way to the coast, we were all – the dog, the cat, me – seasoned travellers. We booked into a campsite in the coastal town of Almunecar, on the Costa Tropical, base camp for a few weeks while the campervan surged out daily on sorties between the coast and Granada looking for a house in either the Lecrin valley or Las Alpujarras.  Then fortune smiled – the elefante blanco, the townhouse in Velez de Benaudalla for which I had sold up and turned my life around, had after all dropped its price back into my price range, was I still interested?

Yes!

Less than two weeks later, we were all crammed into the notary office in Padul – me, my attorney, my translator, the vendors and their attorney – to sign 140 square metres of Spain into my hands. 90 square metres of house, 50 square metres of terrace. I’d already moved in – although I enjoyed living in the camper far more than I expected, there was and is a ton of work to be getting on with, lolling about on a campsite with nothing to do wasn’t an option.

I’m doing more physical labour than ever in my life, with chipped and broken fingernails, paint-freckles, and hair so stiff with plasterdust it looks like a loo brush, but I think I’m happy.  I’ll know for sure when I have time to sit down and think about it without promptly falling asleep. Room by room has been sorted downstairs so I am now in a self-contained apartment of three inter-leading rooms (two of them lead only into the third, it’s a traditional Spanish build) and five in all are in usable mode, now we can start on the rest of the house, the last seven rooms. It’s a big place, neglected and a bit dilapidated after a few years of tenants and a couple of years standing empty, and the ceilings all high, Spanish style, to keep the house cool … there’s a lot to do.

The dog is definitely happy. She was reunited with her proper bed when the furniture caught up, and nearly burst into tears. Her travel bed is now on a covered bit of the terrace, and the toys from her toys box are spreading round the house. I put twenty square metres of fake grass on the terrace, to her delight, and said she could consider it an emergency bathroom facility. She wouldn’t dream of fouling it, and daintily relieves herself on the top patio if there’s too long a break between walks around the town.  Tiles are so easy to clean it hardly matters. After eight weeks of being off-duty she seems pleased to have a doorbell to react to, an area to patrol (albeit twice the size of the workload she had in Scotland) and clear responsibilities once again. I knew she was fully settled when she tried to bite the nice man coming to connect us to the internet.

The cat is happy. The atrium, although largely under ceilings of some kind, has a section left open to the sky and for years while the house stood empty birds have been popping in and making themselves at home. He has a full-time job running them off the premises and takes it very seriously. He spent two nights out exploring the surroundings but hasn’t shown any desire to go out since. He’s colonised the entire upstairs for himself, so will not be quite so happy when me and my builder buddy and the voluble plumber, plus others, start heading that way next week – finishing some time in January, at a guess.

So much for blogging about life on the road. As often as not the campsites only had ‘wiffy’ in the bars, or an intermittent signal at best, and we spent four weeks in one campsite, which doesn’t really count.  It was great, but is already fading so quickly in my memory I’m jotting down notes as I remember bits, I’ll pull them into some kind of book soon, even if only for my own reference.

Now I face having to sell the camper, since every spare cent has to go into the bottomless pit of the house restoration.  Not immediately, since it is invaluable for collecting bulky building stuff, but soon.  It needs a good home, and someone who will enjoy it to the full, because it was absolutely great.  My own car may be less than half the size, fantastically easy to park and practically free to run by contrast, but sailing along the open road, lord of all I surveyed from my high perch, and a new world unfolding in front of us with every mile – Kodak moments linking together into weeks.  Incredible.

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Don’t know where, don’t know when – theoretically Spain –

Limbo … my office closed at the end of April, making us all redundant, and I have a tiny financial cushion while I look for another job – but what kind of job? Temporary, short-term, massive pay, would probably be best because my house is on the market.

If it doesn’t sell, I have to find something permanent (massive pay would continue to be a bonsella) or sell a lot more books to keep the bulldog in the extremely expensive food she has to have because of her pink skin problems.

It may not sell.  My small town on the Firth of Forth is lovely, but short on public transport and therefore not in brisk demand. Scotland generally is unsettled, due to La Sturgeon’s ongoing determination to cut us adrift.  Investors are leaving, not buying, and my erstwhile employers are far from the only national company quietly moving operations down south. These are not ideal selling conditions.

If it does sell, though – hmmm. Spain? There’s an enormous townhouse there, in a lovely little town perfectly positioned for quiet tourists, which would convert into four holiday apartments plus a flatlet for me (I did say enormous!)  Right now, it’s a white elephant of note. Weeds are waist high in the terrace, two of the ceilings are sagging in the most alarming manner, and plaster doesn’t so much flake off the walls as fall off in sizeable chunks. That does mean it is affordable, and it has location location location in Velez: Costa Tropical beaches fifteen minutes away in one direction, spectacular Granada half an hour away in the other, and the ski resorts of the Sierra Nevada beyond that.  I’m about to list some of alarming photos and videos on the house’s Facebook page.  I took my daughter to see it last weekend. She thinks I’m demented. You’ll doubtless agree.

Fair enough. If I achieve everything I want to achieve with it, I’ll look back on the photos and videos I’ve taken and will be pretty astonished myself that I bought it, but that’s in limbo too. Demented I may be, but not to the point of buying it without a structural survey. I saw the house on Valentine Eve, fell in love with its shabby charm and potential, and requested said survey. We are now, hmm, 10th day of May. In theory the survey, promised almost on a weekly basis, is booked at last, for the 19th. Then, and only then, can I make an offer and of course in the meantime anyone could buy it from under my nose.  That would be fun, especially if my house sold at the same time.  Oops. Nowhere to live, and nowhere to go.

The thing is, if this house doesn’t sell, I have fourteen years of mortgage still to clear. Fourteen years! That takes me past retirement age no matter how often our caring government moves the goalposts. I’m not even sure I have fourteen years of life left, and I know for an absolute fact I don’t have fourteen years of Indian summer, it doesn’t work that way. I don’t want to spend those years working to pay a mortgage. The elefante blanco would be bought cash, and although it would never provide enough income to live on, it could reasonably be expected to cover its own upkeep and maintenance. That’s incredibly tempting, a self-sustaining home, erratic flow of visitors, a better lifestyle generally that even costs less. I adore Scotland, but the winds do seem to be blowing.

I’ve let chance and circumstance run my life for nearly twenty years now, and no regrets, not one. Being a straw in the wind brought me to the UK, then to Scotland, into this house, and into writing those books you see in the margin. (Are you up to date on the books? There’s a new one out, and one coming up and about to go on pre-order, make a note in your diary.)

grin

I blew off to Europe increasingly often to meet eclectic members of the singles website I joined to research some of the books. One resulting friend lives near Velez – straws that blew me to the door of #21 Calle de Martires. It feels right. It feels terrifying, at the same time. A stray breeze blew an email from a TEFL college into my mailbox, so I signed up to do a TEFL course – teach English as a foreign language – towards the future, and am enjoying bending my brain. Learning Spanish I’ll leave until when (if) I get there – courses are regularly offered for free either in Velez or a nearby town, and I’d get to meet other newcomers learning Spanish, win win.

Right now, the straws are hanging motionless, and I’m waiting for the wind to pick up again.

There’s a house viewing booked for tomorrow, only the third since I listed the house.  A brief breeze, which will drop again, or the start of a strong driving wind – who knows? Not a clue.

I need a windsock.

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Totally loca

I spotted P, almost inevitably, on line – I mean you know me, cruising the websites, self-proclaimed champion of the autumn rose, the mature single woman –

Well, I don’t mind saying I did a double-take. Wow.  I laughed out loud. I looked again. I read the provided description greedily. I sent the link to my buddy in Spain, mourning the lack of photographs, there were only four. Lovely buddy in Spain promptly found P on another website and sent back 20 photos.

Oh

My

Word

P is gorgeous. Older than I’d normally have gone for, must be said, and absolutely crying out for some TLC, but “wow” factor second to none.

I sent a message email immediately and a hectic exchange of emails followed and, since I was about to visit lovely buddy in Spain, a meet was set up. I could hardly wait – and it was as good as I had hoped, better.  This was love across a, well, must be said, totally empty atrium, but at first sight.

Hard to know what P makes of it all, of course, since P is a large 200-hundred-year-old traditional Spanish townhouse, standing forlornly empty in a narrow re-paved street in the heart of a town stretching back to Moorish influence , between and opposite very beautifully refurbished houses. The P is short for Palabras – Casa de Palabras, House Of Words – because as I wandered starry-eyed through room after room (many of them leading only into each other) (Spanish houses mix up the generations and who needs privacy when you share with family?) the peeling flaking plaster faded away, the spacious empty rooms furnished themselves and P turned into a creative retreat for writers, artists, kindred souls. The faded tiles bloomed again and the hand-painted vivid green ones became more of a feature, less of an eye-sore. The weeds pushing through the cracks in the terrace modestly vanished.

Out of the twelve existing rooms (one a smokehouse for Spanish hams because, you know, every house needs one) my private quarters appeared, and four guest-house suites built themselves in my mind’s eye. Lovely buddy was a building contractor before taking early retirement in Spain and cautiously poked, prodded, frowned, shrugged, and said the house would outlast me and yes, my plans would work. So what if six of the rooms lead only into each other? Two would convert easily into bathrooms behind dividing walls creating short passage-ways. The only rotting roof timber wasn’t a support beam, so it was easily replaced. The dream could be . . .

Before I took my leave, that first time, my legs a little shaky with shock, I had nearly exploded my camera’s memory with hundreds of photographs.

I’ve fallen in love a couple of times over the years but nothing like this. Wow.

I’ll tag these blogs ‘Palabras’ so they can be followed, or avoided, but – could it be forever? Have I the energy, the sheer passion, to follow through? Hell yes. Structural surveys are happening. Currency brokers have been appointed. Future plans for earning a living (I’ll be happy if the guest-house suites support Palabras itself, anything extra would be a cherry on top) are fizzing. Baby steps are being taken when I want giant strides, but inch by inch life with P moves a little nearer.

Yeah, having read this far you probably want a photograph. Thing is, I saw with the eyes of love and fervent imagination. Believe me, I’m already taking some flak. You should just hear my very sensible daughter on the subject.  You’ll see faded and forlorn and what-on-earth-house has windows into its own atrium? But I did set up a Facebook page and I am likely to be a bit of a bore over the next few months.

Oh, and I need to sell my house in Scotland. Now. You want a compact two bedroomed townhouse with small west-facing courtyard, about as unlike Palabras as can be imagined? Call me.