Early July 2009
Having taken to the internet to look for properties which, to be honest and given my calling in life, is where I should have started, I soon exhausted the property market locally so I started to look further afield. Here I stumbled upon Almeria. Oh my god! What a surprise, the price of a local 3 bed flat would buy me a detached cortijo with some ground, visions of The Good Life soon started to play a prominent part in our life.
So, having noted down a few particulars and made appointments to visit a couple of local agents, we decide to take a weeks break and visit the area.
Driving down the Almanzora Valley from Baza to Mojacar I knew we were already sold on the area, what a difference from the concrete coast where we now live.
Making Albox our base, as it is just about in the centre of where we were to look, we stayed with a great couple, Marion and Dennis at their B&B, which I can heartily recommend to anyone visiting the area (phone number supplied on request). An unexpected benefit of this was, it transpired, they had bought their place as an abandoned oil mill and had restored it to it´s current glory themselves and with only the help of several (hundred) bottles of local beer It was encouraging to sit beside their pool in the evening looking through their photo collection of the work that they had done and think ´I could do this´.
7 days and 1000 kilometres later we had seen more towns, villages and hamlets than I care to count, from the tops of mountains (and I do mean the very top in one particular case) right down to the coast. We had looked at every conceivable type of property as well, new build apartments, renovated and not so renovated fincas and cortijos, piles of stone set in a field which, we were assured would soon be a lovely new house and small estates with their very English layout and style. It seemed that we would be spoilt for choice and all so reasonably priced.
Smitten, oh boy, were we smitten.
Continued in Getting Here. Late July