The Property Ladder

Two points: there are a lot of people searching for a home – either to rent or to buy. Also, despite the apparent lack of available properties, Spain has more than 3.5 million vacant homes, representing some 14% of the total housing stock. Around half of these homes are in those smaller municipalities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.

I once shared an apartment in Seville with four other students, me and a British school-friend in bunks in what must have been a converted bathroom, with white tiles on the wall. The other three were studying at the university and came from Montefrío in Granada. The next term, I shared a three-bedroom 8,000 peseta apartment with two students.

It’s fine when you are young and running around the city all night - but not when that single room (share the kitchen and bathroom) costs 1,000€ a month.

We look at the problems of the renters and the buyers – but part of the whole must be the sellers, the landlords and the owners: having a property portfolio is good business.

This is partly why, following the covid when we all worked from home (often in a charming village two hours away from the city), they wanted us to return to the office: taxes, office blocks and city politics. My old mate Cheap Pete once told me (with his New Jersey accent) – for a million dollars you can buy a giant property in North Dacota or a parking lot in Washington DC. But you might wait a whole year to sell that beautiful mountain, or less than a day to sell the city plot.

Which one was the better investment? The second choice, but only if there’s a demand.

No wonder the property barons want to see a certain scarcity – prices (and profits) must go up. In Madrid, some old factories and warehouses, shops and abandoned outlets are now being switched to residential homes, or maybe into 1,000€ a bed-chamber with ‘coliving’ . There’s the advantage of city life, interesting flatmates and maybe a downstairs eatery, if your wallet can still manage the menu del día.

I live in a village on the coast. There’s a giant abandoned hotel taking up a chunk of the infrastructure. It was closed in 2008 and now belongs, for some reason, to the Madrid regional government. It could become fifty apartments. In the back of the next-door port of Garrucha, there’s a large unfinished block of flats, rotting in the sun and covered in graffiti. That’s another fifty potential homes. The scarcity then, is in the city – although there are still a fair number of empty residences even close to the Puerta del Sol.

Many of those who live in the city came from elsewhere, and they may still own a place in the country, a casa del pueblo they’ll visit during the summer or the local fiesta – maybe to show off their success, or perhaps just to take it easy for a while and share a noisy lunch with the cousin who stayed behind. Other people who own a couple of houses might leave one empty. One day the children will live there. Others still will rent, or sell, or turn it into an Airbnb, replace the sheets and towels, and create a cleaning job for Encarnación.

Digital nomads (doesn’t that sound fun?) will rent for a while, working from their laptop, while idly planning their next move to Khartoum or Bucharest. Foreigners will buy the house, and maybe the one next door, and try and put in a swimming pool. Others still will take the week-end option and then leave a cigarette burn in the mattress.

Maybe put in a security system (like it says on the telly) to defy the okupas.

Then there are the millions – apparently – of people who want to rent somewhere half decent for a little bit less than their entire salary, eating rusks and asking their parents for a few extra euros (until either the wage or the rent, whichever one comes first, is raised by a fraction). The Government talks of making (or building) more cheap homes or closing down illegal rentals, or helping the under-thirties buy a house in the smaller towns. Some local governments are considering forcing the sale of empty homes.

The Spanish Constitution Article 47 gives us all the right to una vivienda decente.

The influencers in their YouTube videos meanwhile are talking about investing in their wares (from their bases in low-tax Andorra), and one day soon, you too will be able to afford to buy and rent out houses out like the best robber landlords.

Gloomily, we read: Spain’s record housing market is far from peaking – ‘prices will reach unprecedented levels’. Hey, the higher the price, the happier the owner.

Maybe the foreign Vulture Funds will come and pick up another entire city block: they are here for the opportunities.

A left-wing politician sums up the problem: “People with money in this country invest in gold, the stock market, and real estate”. They buy in the city (Cheap Pete’s parking lot) or on the coast, leaving many thousands of Spanish municipalities by the wayside.

El País has a story about a thirty-year-old who has finally given up on Madrid and moved to the town of Ponferrada – in search of a quieter life, escaping job insecurity and housing prices. “Life moves on and priorities change,” he says blithely.

Then there any many people living in extreme poverty, or in shacks or under bridges. Local guiri Richard Gere may have the answer – he says in a TV interview that "My wife and I have set a goal to end homelessness in Spain within six years". I think that this may prove to be a larger challenge than he imagines. Caritas puts the number of the dispossessed at 37,000.

In all, there are 48 million people living in Spain and 27 million homes – which works out at a house for every 1.8 persons. That’s not so bad…

 

The Better Way to See Granada (is not to look)

A friend from Germany has been staying with me, and last Wednesday, along with my daughter and her husband (and my laptop), we drove up to Granada.

It’s just a couple of hours away, and it is without doubt Spain’s greatest city.

I’ve been many times over the years, but my son-in-law was born and raised there and knows all the oddest and most scenic spots – to say nothing of the best eateries and bars.

We started at a likely looking caff next to the Airbnb apartments we had reserved just off the city hall square. In many places in Granada, a drink comes with a tapa, but it will be something chosen by the house. We had three drinks (it’s thirsty work driving to Granada) and they came out with three plates – and if someone at the table doesn’t like baby octopus, then it’s all the more for me.

In the evening, we wandered down towards the river to admire a couple of fountains (my son-in-law assured me that, as a child, he had fallen into both of them on several occasions). Then, crossing vaguely south over the Río Geníl, we arrived at an outdoor café called ‘La Cuchara de Carmela (¿Donde mejor que aquí? they ask)’, which again decided what tapas we would be treated to. They also had a menu so we could add some more dishes to stand in for dinner.

We have all seen the sites over the years, gone to the flamenco shows in the Sacromonte and been approached by beggars outside the cathedral; indeed the first time I was in the Patio de los Leones in the Alhambra Palace, I was sixteen. I’ve even got the photo somewhere…

So, limited site-seeing this time, and maybe just a selfie or two.

There comes a time, after a few glasses of wine and a belly-full of food, when one must wander on to look for a jolly late-night joint for a schnapps or, um, a tequila!

We went to find an old mate called Sebastian, who used to run a place in Mojácar but has now moved to adventures new in the city. Seba, wearing a tatty-looking Mexican hat, greeted us with every sign of affection in his tiny bar, the Reina Linda. Margaritas and tacos ¡por favor!

The students are now returning to Granada, a university city, and the scruffy, cheaper places like this one do a good trade in the season. There’s nothing – I think you will agree – like writing your thesis or studying those heavy medical books armed with a lightly-chewed pencil and a cocktail.

The next morning, we dropped by to see the parents – mis consuegros – of my son in law. This time, in a residential and passingly more modern part of the city (there were plenty of blocks of apartments in the barrio with the arrows and yoke featured on the walls – that’s to say, built during the Franco years).

I’ll leave the parents in peace, save to note that the first bar, where we met the old dad, was the tiniest bar I have ever seen, crammed only with men, and with the shortest barman in the world. In fact, one has to lean over the counter to be sure that he is there at all.

Again, the tapas chosen by the kitchen were delicious.

And now, we are back in Mojácar, and my friend will soon be flying back to Germany for a few weeks before she returns.

Perhaps we shall do Córdoba then.

 

What's Your Poison?

 I was asking Google’s AI about religion:

In 2025, between 53% and 55% of Spaniards will identify as Catholics, although only a smaller percentage (around 17-19%) are practicing Catholics.

Evangelicals in Spain number one million - or 2%

Currently, almost two million Muslims live in Spain, representing 4% of the total population.

There are (only) 45,000 Spanish Jews.

According to recent data from 2025, the number of Spaniards who declare themselves atheists varies between 15.6% and 21.6%, although other studies combine atheists with non-believers and agnostics, placing the "non-religious" group at around 30-40%.

The Airport Run

Sat in the car at the airport, doing a swing past the guards every so and along so as not to get stuck in the expensive park and queue to pay and lug the suitcases across and up the steps. It’s worse inside with huge hangers full of marble and Germans. I park on the flowerbed for a piece. My old mate and his companion arrive. The girl looks nice. I help haul the suitcases. We leave with the windows down and papers blowing around and out. No air-con in this old car.

With friends staying you want to show them around and impress. That’s right. It’s too early though. I was once in the airport bar having a drink, you know as one does, and Dennis Hopper came in, so I pretended I didn’t know who he was then we bought each other beers and stuff, and laughed at the girls, then it turned out it wasn’t him anyway.

Right, come on, they’re a lot cheaper just down the road here than they are on the coast and, frankly, the company is nicer.

Sandwiched between a tour-bus and a cement truck, we pull off the road at the first opportunity. A few houses stand around, looking unconcerned. The car cools down over another flowerbed, this one rather tatty, as we enter a building through an enormous barn-door. We’ll have a couple of beers and tapas. I’m all knowing as the host; role-playing as a tour-guide with witty answers to all the queries. 

‘…That’s right, donkeys!’

Some blond fellow watches us from the far end of the bar. He probably works down at the nearby cowboy town film-set. A young girl with a bruised face works the beers and the customers. The blond looks like he wants to start something. The foreign residents here have an easy way to measure themselves against each other: how long you bin living here? You must watch their eyes when you face up for this one. It’s a kind of pissing contest where there can only be one winner.

After better than fifty years man and boy, I try and avoid this, as the loser can get sore.

My friends are looking at the sad range of pickled entrails lying under the glass counter.

‘Sí, una ronda de cañas. ¡Oiga!’ The little barmaid brings the drinks and goes ‘t’ree beer?’ and I’m deflating like a spare tyre on a Renault. Kinda place is this anyway? ‘Thank you, dear child. And where are you from?’

Rumania. Well, I’ll be buggered. All these years living here, trying to blend in with the locals and to pick up a few words of various languages as one does, and do you know, I couldn’t even say in her gibberish: ‘I am a secret policeman, where is your sister?’

A Russian friend had been telling me about his work permit and the paperwork he’d given in. He’d prepared and written up the document himself on a sheet from a Saint Petersburg cigarette company with fancy headed paper and had covered it with stamps made with ceiling wax and a melted metal top from a Chivas Regal bottle.

We need people like this in Spain.

By now, we’re into some of those beers that come in dark glass bottles and feeling the kick. The blond fellow has joined us. It’s too hot to take an attitude.

From the terrace you can see a piece of a wide, sandy riverbed. It was here that they shot the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. Well, a small piece of it. A Welshman, cashiered from the Horse Guards, once told me the story of how the producer, Sam Spiegel, had obtained a thousand horses and camels to attack the papier mâché town of Aqaba on the Carboneras coast. The Welshman led the charge dressed in suitable togs but for some reason, with no saddle. ‘One mistake and I would have been trampled to death’ said the Welshman sadly as I solicitously bought him another drink. It is told that, after the single take was successfully filmed, they asked Mr Spiegel what was to be done with the animals.

He answered laconically: ‘Give the horses to the gypsies and shoot all the camels.’

The whole bloody lot. Some reward for being in an Oscar film.

My friend notices that the bar has a sign to say that This Establishement has Complaining Sheets. We order a few to take away with us.

A man in a string vest comes through a door behind the bar. He’s scratching himself with a kind of reserved enthusiasm. ‘You boys look like you would fit in perfectly in Mojácar. You ever been there?’

It’s about an hour’s driving to get to my place. I reckon it’s going to take us a little longer. 

 ...

(I published an earlier version of this in 2009) 

Putting Them Through Their Paces

 I bought my first car from a dealer in Almería. I was eighteen and had recently (that morning, probably) passed the driving test in Huercal Overa. The car was a kind of old Renault van called a 4F with the push-pull gears but fitted with an Ondine engine rather than the usual 4L couchez-avec egg-beater. This meant that the old girl could thunder along at a rather better speed than suggested by the body and was just the ticket for me. The passenger seat was removable; it merely hooked in at the front, so it offered a rather nasty surprise to anyone sat next to me when I stepped on the brake, but with the seat parked on the tarmac, I had room to stretch out full length on a thin mattress for a snooze. That’s right: my first vehicle was a camper.

I remember belting one day down the wiggly line on the map laughably called a road which connected Mojácar with Murcia and all points north. In those far-off times, roads went through towns, rather than round them, which meant you could stop for a libation every hour or two. Trucks would work their winkers to let you pass. There were no discernible speed-limit, and no one took any notice of the signs anyway. There were drain-channels across the road which, if hit with sufficient speed, would cause you to leave a dent in your roof as the car dipped and you didn’t. On this occasion I was approaching Murcia at somewhere over a hundred kph when I saw two cops on the side of the road, just at the point where the road itself dropped about six inches and turned into a rutted track. No warning signs, of course. Spoil the fun. There wasn’t time to slow down nor was I inclined to, as the two grinning policemen waved me past, like fans at the track. I think I broke a kind of automotive long-jump record that day.

The car took me to England in about 1974 on an early adventure in my life, the only time I have ever driven from here-to-there, all the way through to Calais and across the channel. Crossing into France caused me some embarrassment as I stopped at the frontier and whipped out my passport at the desk with a merry ‘Bong-jour’ only to see a small package arc across my line of vision. It was a single and rather elderly prophylactic that I had kept in an inner pocket ‘for emergencies’. To my horror, monsieur le flic saw it as well. ‘Is ze engleesh gentleman goin to defloweur one of our fine French beautees?’ he asked kindly, picking it up and returning it to me. Sadly not.

The front axle of my passion-wagon fell off in Norfolk and a mechanic friend of the family told me that it would cost 50 pounds to repair and that the car wasn’t worth it. Yea, right. So, once fixed, and driving back home, again through France and into Spain, the old Renault van proved him wrong. It lasted another couple of years before I sold it on to the Bédar town hall. 

A few years later, a Spanish friend with an odd sense of humour told our family of how he had just bought a strange foreign car: a brand he couldn’t remember (you could only buy Simcas, Renaults, Citroens and Seats in Spain in those days, peppered vaguely with a few enormous American Dodges and a strange kind of Austin making sure that the British car industry would remain a world power forever). He had left this car, he continued, in Almería, parked on some side-street and the problem was, as he explained to the police, he couldn’t remember where he had left it and, as they attempted to take down some details, he admitted that he had no idea what sort of car it was. Despite this unforgivable lack of crossing one’s tees and dotting one’s ayes, the car was eventually located and returned to its concerned owner… who promptly sold it to my father. It soon became mine. 

It was a two-tone Karmann Ghia 1500 Special and easily the worst car ever made. It had a rear engine hidden under a false boot and a large and empty space in the front, empty, that is, except for some rust and a sack of cement. Without this aid, the front wheels would lose all contact with the road once you got up to about sixty, which may have helped improve my reaction time and general driving skills but must nevertheless be seen as a major design flaw. Sometime along the way, a school-friend came to stay and asked to borrow the car. He seemed a decent sort, and he played a lot of polo. He wanted to go down to Marbella for some amorous reason. I gave him the keys. I have never heard from him or the car since. I hope he’s all right.

I met my fastest and most terrifying car for the first time when wandering around in Madrid and suddenly saw her sat in the window of a second-hand car studio. This was a red Italian super-car, a 1967 Iso Rivolta with a gigantic American Corvette V8 engine in it, making the car capable of breaking the sound barrier. I was about 30 and in the mood for some muscle and so I bought it from the suspiciously grateful dealer for a million pesetas. The car brought me down to Mojácar in a personal record time, helped by not having any brakes at all. It was quite splendid. It turned out that the car had belonged to a political nutter who had shot some left-wing lawyers dead in a famous attack in Madrid in 1977. He obviously wouldn’t be using it for a while. To give you some idea of how fast this luxury four-seater was, the speedo – while unfortunately broken – went up to 300kph.

 But that was then, before they invented air-bags, satellite navigation and eight-track. Today I drive an old Mercedes lovingly made in 1984 which, at a top speed of around 100, is a bit slower than I’ve been used to, but it does mean that the traffic cops and those ugly speed trap gizmos on the motorway will leave me alone as I chug effortlessly past.

These days, that’s enough for anyone.

 

(From Spanish Shilling, 2010)