Arguing about all sorts: the third year of our Spanish adventure

A few years later I read an article in the Granada province newspaper, Ideal, which starkly illustrated how we could have come a cropper. A British man was sold a finca for 90,000 euros in a small village in the Alpujarras in 2005 and spent an additional 25,000 euros doing up the house. In 2007, someone turned up and said they were the owner. The two 'sellers' had cheated the British man by selling him something that didn’t belong to them (pocketing 90,000) and the real owner had had his house fully restored (gaining 25,000 euros worth of improvements). The two 'sellers' were sentenced in 2013 to one year in jail and ordered to pay the money back (there would have been no way to enforce this and they'd probably spent it all anyway).
Well, sorry, but when I read the full story I was very suspicious that the real owner waited two years whilst the house was vastly improved, before declaring it was his. I wonder, what are the chances that in a village, where everyone knows everyone else and they then see some stranger working on a house for a year, that no-one speaks to the 'former' owner about it? And the owner just happens to be absent for two years... Mmm.
I was also intrigued to read in the same report that what had impelled the British person to move to the area was when he read ‘Driving over Lemons.’ The book had also influenced our decision to move to Andalucia. Even though Chris Stewart had indicated in the book that a newcomer might come across cheats for example, this was presented in such a way that you felt, as the reader, that you too could brush aside these issues with the same ease the author suggested he had. If I was going to be extreme, I might say he was unconsciously part of the fraud that led people to believe such a new life would be trouble-free. The book was well-written, entertaining and dishonest. I'd have preferred it to have been less well-written, but honest. Our experience in Spain up to this point suggested that only the most robust should dare begin a new life in a country that was corrupt to its core. 
Of course, had we been less lucky, we might have been victims of fraud. We had after all bought a casa with no title deeds, whereas the British man in the article wasn’t such a risk-taker. In his case, everything seemed to have been done properly with the notario and lawyers and he had no reason to suspect anything was amiss. 
I thought what a shame that an innocent person should fall victim to these criminals.  Having had a lot of experience of being cheated in business*, I was quite au fait with the feelings of anger, disappointment and even humiliation that this led to. And this was sometimes made even worse when the sabelotodos ('sabe-nada' more like) then argued it was the victims' own fault for what these bastards had done to them.

*I wrote about the subject of being cheated on my other blog:

http://www.eyeonspain.com/blogs/thoughtsofeggcup/10062/sugraphobia-bet-you-dont-know-what-it-means.aspx

So three months down the line, when I'd forgotten all about the casa I'd shown Layla and that Simon had turned down, Pepe rang to say the sale to the Dutch woman had fallen through and did we know anyone else who might be interested? It was now April and it seemed that Adrian's curiosity was getting the better of him.
‘If it’s so good, maybe I should take a look at it,' he said, when I got off the 'phone to Pepe. 
'But you said you didn't want to even think about buying any more property.'
'I've changed my mind. Can't I do that? I fancy a project, and this could be the one.'
I felt it was amazing that three sets of people had had the chance to buy it and they'd all let it slip through their fingers. 
As soon as Adrian entered the house and stepped out into the back garden, two days after the call from Pepe, like me he could immediately see how great it was. We offered the asking price on the spot. We then told our lawyer, Ingrid and she took on the liaison with Pepe, aiming to gather all the necessary paperwork. It was exciting to think we'd have such an interesting project to get our teeth into in the September.
However, it wasn't long before Ingrid rang to say she ‘strongly advised’ us against the purchase.  There was no escritura. Apparently the man had owned the house for 50 years but locals often didn't bother to have title deeds drawn up and she thought it was just too risky to go ahead. Pepe had told us the seller was at death's door (he was actually to live for several years afterwards) and had three children, one of whom wasn't speaking to the other two. The daughter who was liaising for her father said they were unwilling to have title deeds drawn up as this would cost them a thousand euros and they were worried that if the sale fell through, they could have wasted this money.
'Tell them we'll pay for the deeds to be drawn up at the same time as we put the 10% deposit down,' I suggested.
But the daughter also refused to accept the 10% deposit as if they, for some reason, could not then go ahead (if the father died in the middle of the process for example and the errant brother refused to sign), she was worried they'd be liable to refund the 10%, plus an additional 10%.
'Draw up a contract which says they wouldn't have to pay the extra 10%,' I said to Ingrid (God, we even had to do the thinking for the lawyer). But the daughter wouldn't agree to that either. In the end, we handed over a thousand euros to legalise a house that didn't belong to us, and whose owners could then decide to sell it to someone else if they wanted. Ingrid strongly advised us against this course of action and said we should abandon the purchase. We ignored her.
Even after the sale had then gone through in the August, there was a further complication. We now had to publish our ownership of the house in the Ayuntamiento (that is, have a piece of paper with the details pinned up in a glass cabinet on the wall of the reception area at the town hall) and invite anyone who felt like it to challenge our ownership of the house within a two year period. This meant for example that as were about to completely gut the house, install electricity, plumbing, do the plastering, lay floors, install a kitchen and bathrooms, extend it, put on a new roof and install a swimming pool, at a cost of over 70,000 euros, theoretically we could be doing all this work for the potential 'challenger.' It was a calculated risk as we had got Ingrid to get all of the immediate neighbours to sign that they recognised the ownership of the house as being the seller's and to agree that the borders were correct. 
And in fact nobody did challenge it during the next two years and it turned out to be our best investment in Spain (goes to show you shouldn't always listen to lawyers).

I had also taken a Norwegian woman, Liv, down to La Gloria to view houses with Pepe. I'd driven her the one and a half hour round trip in my four-by-four, as she had no transport. I'd hit it off with her partly because she spoke German and had agreed to only speak to me in it, so that I could practise (my only German friend, Beate, had the infuriating habit of constantly going back into English despite the fact she could speak English all the time with her many British friends).  
So I'd ferried 'Liv' down to La Gloria, and we spent a couple of hours going around the valley, with me translating while Pepe showed us various houses he thought might suit her. I even ended up paying for the drinks (as well as paying for the diesel and giving up my free time). What do you do when you’re with two people in a bar, it's time to leave and neither of them will get their purse or wallet out?  Liv said she’d fetch me a Mohnkuchen (poppy seed cake) from Berlin, as she was going there the following month, so I licked my lips in anticipation (I’m still waiting for it).  
Anyway, after having given up a day for her, she rang me up:
'I've got a list of 12 questions for Pepe, so if you can write them down and ring him, that would be great,' she said.
Well, actually I've always hated talking on the ‘phone (it's almost a phobia) and even more so when speaking a foreign language and even more so when speaking to Pepe as he was incomprehensible face-to-face, never mind on the ‘phone.  Also, why the hell should I?  
'Look, I know someone who can translate for you,' I said, 'because it's not my thing.'
‘Oh. What will that cost?’ she asked.  
‘About 20 euros an hour, I think,’ I replied.  
‘That seems a bit much,’ she answered.  
Yes, I thought, if you assumed that I, as a relative stranger, would do it for nothing, then 20 euros would seem a lot. I gave her Beate's number and left them to it.
Come to think of it, she had been a pretty awkward client, generally having no interest in anything she was shown. Instead, she'd point to a ruin in a ravine, on the shaded side of the valley.
'Kannst du fragen, how much is that one?' she'd ask, pointing, even though it wasn't for sale.  So I'd ask if Pepe could find out if the owner would consider selling and if so, for how much?  (TIME WASTER!) Towards the end of the morning, however, Liv expressed some interest in a shed on a large piece of land. The owner was there and said he wanted 80,000 euros for it.  
I thought nothing of it until a week later Adrian and I were seated around a large table in the garden of a friend's house for the joint birthday party of their daughter and ours, when we overheard German Martin's loud voice as he addressed Pepe.
'Eres mentiroso y  engañas,' he was saying casually. 'You're a liar and a cheat.'
Pepe's face fell. Up until then he'd seemed  to be enjoying socialising with a group of mostly expats in Adreimal, having been delighted when we'd invited him. He'd brought his wife and children, all dressed in their Sunday best. His face turned ashen as the insults registered.
But Martin was enjoying himself.
'Hey, don't vorry,' he said to me in English, when I tried to intervene, 'you don't understand dee Spanish people. Dees Spanish estate agents neffer mind being called liars and cheats. Dey know vee know vot dey are like.'
'Martin, that's nonsense,' I replied. 'Pepe isn't used to being spoken to like that. You can see he's furious. Stop it!'
Martin carried on. He was 'explaining' to Pepe how the Norwegian woman had told him that Pepe had inflated the asking price for the finca by 20,000 euros which Pepe presumably intended to pocket himself. Liv said she'd returned to the piece of land another day (she'd persuaded another Brit we knew to take her all the way there as she had no car) and the man had quoted her 60,000.  
I said to Martin: ‘If that's the case, how could she have found it out, when she speaks no Spanish, the guy who took her doesn't either and the man at the house only speaks Spanish?’ 
When Adrian told Martin off again later on, saying it wasn’t acceptable for him to call Pepe names at a party and that he didn’t even know him, Martin couldn't care less. 
'Dey are used toovit. Dey don't care at all,' he repeated. 'Dat is vot dee Spanish are like vizz each udder.'  
But when Martin strolled off to the other side of the terrace, presumably to insult someone else, Pepe said, 'I can't believe what that man said to me. All I did was tell the Norwegian woman what the man wanted for the finca.' I was a witness that Pepe was telling the truth.  
Of course Martin may have had an ulterior motive in polluting the Norwegian’s mind against Pepe, as he was always on the lookout for buyers.  Now that his wife had done some translating for Liv, he saw her as the client of both of them and he'd been showing her a few places on his books. 
I felt the whole afternoon was ruined, especially when Adrian added that he felt the whole drama was partly my fault. 
‘If you hadn't been such an idiot, wasting your time showing properties to strangers, none of this would have happened.' 
Thanks. So I get blamed for being nice. Of course, it was this altruism on my part and the fact that I'd also performed the same service for Layla which resulted in us benefitting, since we ended up buying the house ourselves. Good turns sometimes hit you back in the face; at other times, they can turn out quite nicely.

We spent the summer in Wales whilst the purchase of a casa in La Gloria went on without us; we'd given a poder, or power of attorney to our allegedly bi-lingual lawyer, Ingrid. Upon our return to Spain in September we would be ready to launch into this latest project - the restoration and extension of a glorified shed with overgrown garden in an Andalucian village of about 700 inhabitants.

What a relief it was to not have to return to toxic Adreimal, and to be starting afresh in a new place. No more being surrounded by the expat crowd of scrounging wasters on the one hand and snotty liberals judging us as not cool enough for their gang, on the other; not to mention the many hostile, money-grabbing Spaniards.

Not that we expected to find Nirvana; nowhere's perfect. But there was just something about La Gloria. You could tell just by breathing in the air of the village. If you walked 20 yards, someone would say 'hola.' That was a novelty. Naturally, serious problems were looming (such is life); but at least this time they would be of a different nature to the problems we'd experienced during our two years in Adreimal.

The plan was to live at our cortijo while the casa in the village was being 'reformed,' to use the Spanglish expression (as though the house's character were in need of an overhaul after a spell in prison). We had registered the children at La Gloria's escuela primaria, a friendly village school with immaculately-dressed teachers who seemed to genuinely welcome the prospect of their first British pupils (our five and six-year olds).

And the village house would be ready to move into within a few months or so we hoped. As long as part of it was habitable we were willing to rough it whilst the rest of the building work went on around us. In the meantime we would be up a track in the countryside, in a cortijo with no mains electricity and no drinking water. The Spanish never lived in these houses in the winter (just mad Brits) and we had no idea what it would be like. But we had no choice until the village house was ready.

The casa itself had first been spotted by me in the January of our second year in Spain. At the time, Adrian had forbidden me to even mention buying any more property of any description, either in the UK (as part of our rental business) or Spain, but he hadn't been able to stop me helping others. So I would do favours for friends or acquaintances, even driving them around for nothing, because I enjoyed looking at houses, ruins, bits of land, anything really. It was mi pasatiempo.

And if they say you need vision in the property business, well, when I saw the casa I saw the potential immediately. We walked through the scruffy little building, our shoes sticking to the floor that was splattered with avocados and oil and stepped out into the densely overgrown garden with its avocado, orange, mandarin, fig and lemon trees, and I parted and peered out through the branches of the heavily-laden trees. What I saw was the most sensational view of a hazy mountain range, with layers of other ranges fading out into the distance. It was rare enough to get a house with a garden in the village, but the location of this one was magnificent and the view could not be spoiled as the land was on the edge of the village and fell heavily downwards to the much lower terrace of the neighbour's huerta.

The person I was helping that day in January was Layla. I'd come down with her and her sister, my friend Jenny from Adreimal. I'd advised her that she'd be far better off buying in a lovely Spanish village like La Gloria than up in Adreimal with its hundreds of unkempt expats and inexplicably rude Spaniards. And when Jenny saw the casa she felt the same way about it as I did, although curiously she never felt the same way about Adreimal. As neither of the women spoke much Spanish, I agreed to translate while Pepe López took us around various properties. As usual, he first showed us silly houses; one consisted of a windowless corridor and was in the village a further 15 minutes inland and higher up, which was apparently as cold as Adreimal in the winter; another in La Gloria resembled a prison with numerous cell-like rooms on four floors, with high-voltage electricity cables and a pylon dominating the garden (I didn't want to think what that might have been used for in the 1930s). The casa stood out as something really special.

'She'll be mad if she doesn't take it,' I said to Jenny.

'Yes, it's fabulous, darling,' she agreed. 'Quite bijou. It would be perfect for you, Layla,' she declared. 'You could have a double bedroom and ensuite upstairs and a little salon and kitchen downstairs. And imagine a darling pool and maybe a jacuzzi, with no-one overlooking you. And the views are just to die for.'

'How much will it cost to make it liveable?' Layla asked.

'¿Cuánto costaría para reformar la casa?' I translated to Pepe.

'Pues, solo dos millones,' was his reply.

'He says 2 million pesetas, which is 12 thousand euros,' I said to Layla. 'But you can double that.'

'¿Que?' Pepe seemed frustrated. 'What are you saying? I can't understand you.'

'Si, that's why I'm translating,' I replied to Pepe, straight-faced. 'No tengo la culpa, it's not my fault if you can't speak English. I just translated what you said.'

But Layla wasn't sure about the place.

'I'll sleep on it and let you know tomorrow,' she decided.

'Well, don't think too long,' I replied, 'as this one won't stick around.'

Later that evening, Adrian and I were having a drink with Simon and Charlotte in the village bar when I mentioned how I'd spent my day. When I said how great the house was, Simon started to interrogate me, but I refused to be drawn on the location, in case he tried to gazump Layla.

'If she decides against it, I'll let you know where it is and you can go and see it,' I reassured him. Adrian just read El País, feigning disinterest in all matters property-related.

The following morning I rang Layla.

'I've decided it's not for me,' she said. 'I'm going to stick with Adreimal.'

Having got to know a few people in the town and and not knowing anyone apart from us in La Gloria, she felt she might get lonely in a village. I rang Simon and Charlotte immediately as promised, and told them Pepe could show them. I expected to then hear that they were snapping it up. At 53,000 euros it was a bargain.

I was astonished then, the next day, when I heard Simon's verdict.

'We've done the sums and it doesn't make financial sense as an investment. It's far too small and you'd never get permission to make it any bigger. We're not interested and I've told Pepe.'

A couple of weeks later I heard that a Dutchwoman had put in an offer. That was the end of that or so I thought.