Finally I asked the question to the Mayor, how many other people want to take the bar ?
Oh, no one ! Then isn't the decision easy ? You have a bar you want to rent out and I want to rent it and you have no one else interested, what is the problem ?
The next day the contract was waiting for me ! I was right we had three days to get it back !
We took it to the lawyer to be checked over, paid the deposit into the bank. We also had to pay an additional security that had to be signed by the notaria, that would be held in a separate account that the town hall could only get to if we signed authority and we could only get to if they signed authority. Not an easy thing to get done, the bank manager had to come with us, we were told not to speak to the notaria, just let them sign it. Sitting in the office was interesting, all these people milling around, not that I could understand what was going on.
We were so excited, to be finally at this point, we had no idea how much work would need to be done before we could open, but we did know that it needed painting inside and out ! We had already spoken to Mr and Mrs W who had kindly agreed to help, it would also help them out as their B&B was very quite, so any extra cash would help them also, win, win ! Their son Steve was Fluent in both English and Spanish, and also looking for work, so he agreed to be our barman, we were not sure how busy we would be or not, but knew our Spanish wasn't good enough to do it alone.
From the bars inventory which was very basic, we knew a few shopping trips would be order. We would only have to wait a few more days to find out exactly what we needed to do and buy !
The long awaited day arrived we were to meet Antonio from the town hall at the bar with the signed contract and to get the keys.
He arrived at exactly the moment we did ! We were so excited and terrified at the same time, remember we had not been in before, would we be able to pull this off ?
The contracts where signed and the keys handed over, somewhere along the line the keys for the metal security grids on the outside of the windows had got lost. The bar was in a bit of a state needing some TLC but we had knew that !
We where now standing alone in our bar !
It turned out to be an amazing adventure and a lot of blood, sweat and tears and that was before we opened !!