My wife, Celine, and I, a couple of retired European expats, live a life in California that we both feel leaves a lot to be desired. So a few years ago we made the decision to start looking for another country to build our nest anew. As regular readers of International Living, we started our search in a couple of the Central and South American countries that so many writers had been enthusing about, namely Costa Rica and Ecuador. Both had their attributes, but we quickly realised that what we really wanted was to become Europeans in Europe once again, and be back amongst the culture, the history, and people with whom we would have more in common than we do with our Californian neighbours. So, with good memories from earlier visits to the country, and French being our strongest of the romance languages, last September we set off on a six-month intensive study of southern France from Provence in the east across to Aquitaine in the west, with an excursion into Spanish Basque country and short, unscheduled, side trips to the Italian Riviera and Spain’s Costa Brava.
This was, however, no extended holiday, for we planned to spend four to six weeks in three or four destinations where, as far as it is possible to do so in short-term rented accommodation, we would live like locals, buying our supplies in the local shops and markets, and also scout around the local areas to get the bigger picture.
We arrived without clearly defining what we wanted from a nesting site, preferring to discover what would attract us both. And so we spent six months exposing ourselves to a variety of locales, getting excited by some more than others. Occasionally, we would get perilously close to making rushed decisions about buying properties, whilst totally ignoring our promises to ourselves to do nothing rash, to rent for a year before deciding to buy, to always seek English speaking advice and guidance, and to be absolutely certain how much we could afford before making an offer!
We started our journey with a month in Lyon where we had found a good school of languages to bone up on our French; it wasn’t, however, a potential nesting site due to its rather cold winter weather. Our nest-hunting really began with six weeks in Provence, but they passed by without temptation; we simply never found anywhere that made us want to settle. It was in Ospedaletti, just outside San Remo, the self styled capital of la Riviera de las Flores, at the western end of the Italian Riviera, where Delilah first tried her tricks. We had a week to fill between our pre-booked stay in Lorgues, a Provence village popular with expats, and a three week house-sit in Montpellier, and had decided to spend it exploring the nearest bit of Italy.
We had found an apartment in Ospedaletti, just 30m from the shore with a spacious balcony and a spectacular view over the Mediterranean. We were entranced, and not just with the view. The town itself had a certain faded elegance and charm, and was wonderfully unspoilt after the developmental excesses we had seen all along the French Riviera to the west. We drove into San Remo a couple of times, a city that seemed to tick many of our boxes, culture, architecture, and good shopping, and had the air of an honest working town without the overt touristic ostentatiousness of its French neighbours. The hook had been set and it only took a few words with our Italian landlord, who just happened to be in the real-estate business, before he was driving us around showing us what could be bought for the €350,000 we thought we could afford. And after three ‘duds’, too much renovation required, lousy view, no parking space, and one very nice apartment that, unfortunately, was way outside our budget, we explained to Simone that perhaps we should just ‘keep in touch’. We liked the location but none of his offerings really suited our needs. But Simone was not to be put off quite so easily.
Now that he understood better what we were looking for – somewhat surprising as we still weren’t really sure ourselves – Simone had one more place that he would like to show us which he was absolutely certain would be just perfect. And so the following day, on the morning of our departure, he took us for a short walk along the rocky shoreline, around a slight promontory and there before us was a three storey building set in amongst a few pine trees. The apartment in question was on the first floor, had two large bedrooms, two bathrooms, a decent living room, an adequate kitchen opening onto a small garden, and a long enclosed verandah looking straight at the sea with more or less the same lovely views we had been enjoying for the last week. And the price was pretty well exactly what we had in mind. Of course we thought it was wonderful. Sure we would need to spend some money refurbishing the kitchen, but that was work I could easily handle myself. We would have our own parking space directly beneath the verandah, it was well off the main road, there was no public access to the property, and there were only two other occupants in the building so no housing association complications. There seemed to be some question as to whether or not the windows around the verandah had been the subject of planning permission, but the other two apartments had been similarly modified and no questions had been asked. A friend of Simone’s owned one of the other apartments, and, surprise, Simone also knew the seller very well. It all sounded very good and was our ideal nest in so many ways. To say we were tempted is to put it mildly, until the bombshell landed. The owner had already received one offer at the asking price, but would accept a cash offer if we wanted to seal the deal. Our minds raced furiously as we mentally worked out that we could indeed raise the cash, but at the same time little niggling doubts began to foment.
It was really just as well that we were leaving later that morning. So as we walked back to Simone’s apartment and he helped us carry our suitcases to the car, we explained our dilemma and agreed we would get back to him that evening, once we had arrived in Montpellier. But in our hearts we knew we had to calm down and not be blinded by such a little gem of a home. We talked about little else during our drive back along the A8 autoroute, and by the time we were arriving in the outskirts of Montpellier as dusk fell, we knew that we had been very close to making a huge mistake. We had not spoken to an English speaking solicitor, we had only a vague knowledge of the Italian system of buying and selling property, we weren’t even one hundred percent sure of the exchange value of our savings in UK and USA. But it had been a real shock for us to learn how impetuous we could be.
You’d think after that we would have been far more principled in our house-hunting escapades, but you’d be wrong to think that we would control our instincts better. Our next short, unplanned stay was a week in the pretty, old fishing village of Calella de Palafrugell on the Spanish Costa Brava. Your scribe had stayed there with his parents some fifty years previously and was surprised as well as delighted to find that it had not suffered the ravages of over-development that is such an epidemic along much of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The small beaches in the middle of the village and the many isolated rocky coves where I remembered swimming in the clear azure sea with my father, were all just as delightful as ever. Walking the narrow footpath twisting its way among the rocky outcrops between the coves along the shoreline around the bay and on into the neighboring village of Llafranc, was a blissful way of getting our daily exercise. Even Palafrugell, the town four kilometres inland, where we would have to go for all our shopping and medical needs, was pleasant enough. Open countryside was all around, the handsome city of Girona was only an hour’s drive inland, and the port of Palamos just a few kilometres down the coast. And Calella itself was so wonderfully clean and quiet, actually rather too quiet we realised as the days went by, and the view of the sea from our balcony was again beautiful even though this time the sea was further away. But wouldn’t it be a wonderful place to live, we kept saying to each other. No tourists for nine or ten months of the year, fine countryside all around, we simply had to make contact with the local real estate office, and just see what might be available. And so the process began once more, though we didn’t get quite so carried away this time. Again we chatted with our landlord, from whom we learned that nearly 75% of the properties in the village, were owned by Spaniards from big cities like Barcelona and Madrid, who came to Calella for holidays and weekends. So there was not much chance of having year-round friendly neighbours. But still we ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’, while ‘umming’ at the same time, as we weighed up the pros and cons of life in a small, but very beautiful, holiday community, still without the benefit of local legal knowledge and advice, and once again getting ourselves very excited about a place we had been in for less than a week.
They say about love that when it arrives you will know about it without question, that your instincts have a very real sense of having found the right life-partner. But, just like loving a person, loving a place still has to be given time to grow and develop gradually. All the same, it is just as easy to fall blindly in love with a beautiful environment, as it is to believe the person with whom you danced the previous night away is quite without fault.
So we determined to spend the rest of our six months being far more pragmatic when looking at properties. But, like “the best laid schemes o’mice an’ men” our good intentions did go a ‘wee bit awry’. Nothing really grabbed us during the next five weeks, on a home-exchange in a very small village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where the December winds blew overly cool and big city culture was just too far away. But, as February and early spring arrived we found ourselves in Spanish Basque country staying in the little fishing port of Getaria, living in a very smart modern apartment high above a small sandy cove, enthralled by our view of the waves from the Bay of Biscay crashing on the rocks to right and left. There was an awful lot that was right about this environment. The village was tucked below a hillside atop of which began miles of green rolling countryside. The town of Zarautz, five minutes drive along the coast road, had all the amenities we could want, the beautiful small seaside city of San Sebastian was half an hour’s drive to the east and the much revitalized, port city of Bilbao, with all its culture, an hour to the west. The countryside was beautiful in all directions, and French Basque country just an hour away. And, the final Delilah touch, two or three of the apartments in our building were for sale. So we just had to go and see. We actually ended up looking at four apartments in the end. The first two weren’t quite right, and the next two were superb, but, sadly, way above our ‘budget’. And anyway, none of them had a garden, something which your scribe feels very strongly about.
Still, it was early days, and as we had several more days in the area we decided to investigate the property market in more depth; and that was when we discovered that single-family homes with small gardens are somewhat of a rarity in that part of Spain. It’s something to do with planning regulations, which severely restrict the sale of agricultural land for development, a virtue for one who loves the countryside more than bricks and mortar, but it does explain the Spanish obsession with high-rise apartment buildings that tend to spoil so many of the small fishing villages along the coast. You understand, by this stage we were starting to think a lot more carefully. But then again, if we were to sell our condo in California, then we could actually afford the loveliest of the penthouse duplex apartments in our building, and it did have a terrace large enough to grow quite a lot of plants and vegetables, and the views were beautiful, and it was such a friendly village and . . . and . . . so on.
Yes, the tentacles of temptation were slowly drawing us in once again, and dangerous thoughts were becoming ever stronger. Something inside of me was beginning to feel a slight sense of failure, that our six months was drawing a blank; even after visiting and seeing so many beautiful places, we seemed to be unable to find that ideal nesting place. Would we ever do so?
There was still French Basque country to explore, which we were able to do from our base in Getaria. Hendaye and St.Jean de Luz were two small towns very close to the frontier, each of which in their own way, proved very attractive, and so we wasted no time in visiting two or three local ‘immobilieres’ (real estate agents). Their response was very positive, especially now that our ‘budget had risen to €500,000! We found the French Basque housing market to be very different from the Spanish. The concept of single-family homes is very much the norm and we were immediately able to visit four or five homes, all of which could have possibilities, but just two of which really made us stop and think very hard. The first, up one of the hills on the outskirts of Hendaye, was in many ways the most suitable property we had seen. Three spacious bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large open-plan kitchen/living room, beautiful Spanish mosaic floors everywhere, except for the oak floors in the bedrooms, a large southwest facing balcony with views towards both the mountains and the sea (unfortunately split by the outsize chimney of the house below!), a fair sized garden, an enormous undeveloped basement, large enough to subdivide into a dance floor, a workshop and a garage, a conversion-ready loft, and the price was within budget. By this stage though, we were being ultra-cautious, we needed to know more about living in Hendaye, in fact we needed to stick to our guns and rent for at least six months before we made a decision to purchase. So, rather dejectedly, we walked away from it.
We also visited St Jean de Luz and decided that it too was every bit as charming as we had read, but property prices in the town itself put it out of the range of even our ‘new’ budget. All the same, we continued looking, met a very helpful estate agent in Urrugne, a commune a few kilometres inland, who showed us a couple more houses, one of which was a beautifully built home in the countryside with a well kept garden and views of the mountains, being sold by an elderly couple who had built the home themselves some thirty years earlier. Again we had to turn away, and console ourselves with the knowledge that we had at least found an area we would happily return to one day and try the nest-renting process.
But then again, perhaps we should look at Italy more closely, and what about this little country of Portugal, which everyone says is such a fine place for retirement? And that, dear readers, will be another story.
Footnote: Looking for illustrations for this post has made me realise how difficult it is to take photographs that effectively convey the true sense of a place. We took a few thousand photographs during our travels but hardly a single one adequately shows you why we were so tempted. So when this article was published by Live and Invest Overseas I was quite relieved to see that they used stock photos. They also edited it in places, quite effectively if I’m honest!