Exploring
We spent a week renting a basic apartment in the most beautiful of setting. An old barn made into an apartment, across the court yard was the main house, the original cortijo, with all it’s country charm. We spent time in the swimming pool, exploring the local area, the fresh vegetable market, the main square, the church and the castle.
We also ventured down to Mojacar. It was unrecognisable as the place of my childhood. It had roads, shops, more than one hotel, it had bars and restaurants, it even had a promenade. In the 1980’s there was nothing really.
The road to the airport in Almeria had been a single lane, little more than a dirt track hanging to the mountain side. We would sit in the coach looking down at the sheer drop, to the abundance of car remains below. At times it felt that the wheels of the coach were hanging over the edge and that the only reason we did not join the car grave yard was luck.
Now twenty years later it is a two lane proper road, in places you can see where the old road was, how narrow, twisty and close to the edge it used to be.
Mojacar village still held onto it’s old fashioned magic even with the all the tourists and the shops that had arrived to cater for them, it was still wonderful and with every step I was transported back to my childhood.
It made me realize how much I wanted to live here in Spain, this trip had proved it, it was like coming home.
We decided we didn’t want to be in Mojacar, it was now too touristy to be our everyday, forever home. A village inland where it was to some degree like going back in time, but with modern luxuries like electric and water (some of the time at least !).
Now all we needed was to work out how we would get jobs without speaking Spanish. As we were weighing up our options, the answers we were looking for appeared. Barry had a friend who had just brought an old mill, locally to where we had been staying, and guess what, he offered Barry a job. He was to run it as an outdoor activity centre, when the building work was finished. In the mean time when planning permission had come through, Barry was to help the builder. It was like all the stars had aligned, we now had a way we could make it happen. Little did we know, what was to come.
