A huge number of British people have purchased real estate in Spain, either as a nursing home or simply for occasional holidays.
Most British people tend to choose spots somewhere like Marbella or Benidorm, where foreigners make up about 5% of the population. However, Sue and Andy Whaute, from Somerset, find themselves instead living in “real Spain.”
Sue, 61, explains that she was not interested in moving into an area littered with “English pubs” and shops offering a taste of the house. Instead, they rediscovered the quality that the UK says has lost.
Sue and her husband Andy bought a 500-year-old home in Birna, a small city of about 36,000 people just under 40 miles inland from Benidorm.
The two-acre property cost just 93,000 euros (£78,252) in 2002.
But it was not just a retreat in the country that the money bought them, but a sense of community that they could no longer find in the UK. She told I-Paper: “The sense of community is very strong and I think it's lost in the UK. Family values.”
“I wanted to move here in 2002,” Sue added. “We wanted to experience the real Spain, rather than moving from England to England with the sun,” he said.
Andy, 63, added: “We were looking for property with space. We couldn't get it on the coast, but we wanted our kids to experience Spain.”
He said that while there may be hundreds of British people in Virena, they not only live in a warm version of Somerset, they were not interested in the true Spanish lifestyle.
Sue says the real benefits of moving to Vilena are rediscovering a more traditional lifestyle. She continued: “The fact that everyone knows and greets you, and that they haven't tried to get to know you yet.
“And that sounds ridiculous, but the cooking is like what we ate back then, when we were kids, stew, and stuff like that.”
She goes on to say that they have embraced more traditional diet and lifestyles, but there was one or two concessions to the country they left behind.
