Confirming the worst kept secret of recent months....
After 10 years as nomads and 3 years in Spain, we have decided that Spain, and in particular Gandia beach is where we want to base ourselves in future, so much so that we have bought a piece of it. We completed the purchase of a plot of land yesterday with a view to building a house on it in a few years.
After the self absorbed bullshit of catalan independence, Valencia has been a pleasant change where people just get on with life and don't ram how they are special and unique and different down your throat at every opportunity. Gandia as a town has pretty much everything we want - big enough to have its own character, close enough to get to Valencia when we want to and still primarily Spanish - there isn't a british pub in the place. Further south towards Alicante you start to get the larger expat communities that we can dip into if we want, and all the towns we visited this spring to the north of Valencia are a bit small and don't seem very interesting. Ditto the places we visited down in Murcia before christmas - Cartagena was a nice city but not one to live in permanently, and everywhere else was too dry and hot and desolate. Gandia seems just right.....
After 10 years as nomads and 3 years in Spain, we have decided that Spain, and in particular Gandia beach is where we want to base ourselves in future, so much so that we have bought a piece of it. We completed the purchase of a plot of land yesterday with a view to building a house on it in a few years.
After the self absorbed bullshit of catalan independence, Valencia has been a pleasant change where people just get on with life and don't ram how they are special and unique and different down your throat at every opportunity. Gandia as a town has pretty much everything we want - big enough to have its own character, close enough to get to Valencia when we want to and still primarily Spanish - there isn't a british pub in the place. Further south towards Alicante you start to get the larger expat communities that we can dip into if we want, and all the towns we visited this spring to the north of Valencia are a bit small and don't seem very interesting. Ditto the places we visited down in Murcia before christmas - Cartagena was a nice city but not one to live in permanently, and everywhere else was too dry and hot and desolate. Gandia seems just right.....
We started looking at land almost by chance at the start of the year, and once the idea took hold it just seemed a natural next step. We always wanted to be in a town with easy public transport and access to shops, beach, etc and with a good selection of restaurants. There are not many plots left in the beachside urbanizations (estates) but we found one right at the north end of the developed area about half a kilometer back. Quiet and with a small public park next door and then a bit of a wetland nature reserve, hopefully that side will never be built on and we should have views of sunsets over the mountains - despite Johnmills best efforts to introduce us to dawn by booking stupidly early flights we've never been sunrise people :-)
It will still be a few years before we can sell up in the UK and start building here proper, but we will spend the winter here and start discussions with architects and builders about what we want and will be allowed to build ; I favour a modernist, open plan house with lots of energy efficiency design features. There are quite a few such places mixed in with more traditional Spanish style villas in the Kentuky urbanization (yes, that is the correct Spanish spelling) so hopefully it will be approved and not stand out like a sore thumb. And maybe by then energy-intensive building materials like concrete and steel will have dropped back to more normal prices from where they are now. Otherwise i'll be planting some trees and growing a log cabin.
So, another factor in our cutting short this summer's Baltic trip was to come back here to look for another rental property to tide us over. There is quite a big university presence here so a lot of properties are let at lower rates to students and lecturers september - may, and then are used by their owners or let out as holiday rentals for the busy and expensive summer months. We have agreed to take a small 2 bed 2 bath flat towards the southern end of the beach from October for 7 months as a base while we get the initial design work underway, then we will hopefully be able to head back up and finish off the Baltic tour later next summer.
It will still be a few years before we can sell up in the UK and start building here proper, but we will spend the winter here and start discussions with architects and builders about what we want and will be allowed to build ; I favour a modernist, open plan house with lots of energy efficiency design features. There are quite a few such places mixed in with more traditional Spanish style villas in the Kentuky urbanization (yes, that is the correct Spanish spelling) so hopefully it will be approved and not stand out like a sore thumb. And maybe by then energy-intensive building materials like concrete and steel will have dropped back to more normal prices from where they are now. Otherwise i'll be planting some trees and growing a log cabin.
So, another factor in our cutting short this summer's Baltic trip was to come back here to look for another rental property to tide us over. There is quite a big university presence here so a lot of properties are let at lower rates to students and lecturers september - may, and then are used by their owners or let out as holiday rentals for the busy and expensive summer months. We have agreed to take a small 2 bed 2 bath flat towards the southern end of the beach from October for 7 months as a base while we get the initial design work underway, then we will hopefully be able to head back up and finish off the Baltic tour later next summer.
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