3 bed 2 bath Apartment in Orihuela Costa Ref 92426 

€ 174,900

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Great urbanization of apartments with 2 or 3 bedrooms in a prime location on the Orihuela Costa, just 1 km from Villamartin Golf Course, about 10 minutes’ drive to the beach and the Zenia Boulevard shopping centre, and with bars and restaurants walking distance.
Quality properties, being built around a green area with 2 swimming pools, one of them with spa, jacuzzi and gym, benefit from pre-installed air con and underground parking. There are different options from ground floor apartments with a garden, first and second floor properties with a balcony and fantastic penthouses with a private solarium including a jacuzzi; all them with a modern design boasting a lounge/dining room with sliding doors out to the terrace; open plan and superbly fitted kitchen; 2 or 3 double bedrooms with fitted wardrobes and 2 modern bathrooms. This location is the best, close to Villamartin Golf Course and two more golf courses just around the corner, surrounded by everything you need and good communication to Murcia and Alicante airports. Great opportunity for a low maintenance holiday home.

Tourist Licence For Your Holiday Home Spain 3

The last video on Tourist Licence For Your Holiday Home  Spain 3

Tourist Licence For Your Holiday Home in Spain 2

This is the 2 Part of 3 videos about getting your Tourist Licence for your Holiday home on the Costa Blanca

Tourist Licence For Your Holiday Home in Spain !

This is a 1 of a 3 part videos about getting your Tourist Licence for the Costa Blanca 

Is renting your house as a holiday let still a viable option? Part 4 Other requirements

Is renting your house as a holiday let still a viable option?

Part 4 – Other requirements

Being legal and having a licence applies to the property owner but avoiding fines also means ensuring those you use to work for you are also legally registered.   There have in the past been those who were paid keyholders and cleaners who were working cash-in-hand and not declaring their income. When you register for your password with the Guardia Civil they will ask who acts as your keyholder if you are not yourself resident in Spain.  They note the name and contact details and request the person concerned attend the office with their passport and tax number. If you are found employing an unregistered worker, then you can both be fined.

Another common practice has been for people to act as unofficial taxis providing airport transfers.  There are regulations regarding this and recently a mini bus owner was fined 6000 euros when stopped by police and the passengers said they were paying the man.   Yes, that said six thousand euros! The fines in Spain are not small!

For some reason no one yet asks you to produce copies of your insurance certificate, but I’m sure that will come in time as you do need to be insured.  We have always had a specialist holiday rental policy from a UK insurer (small-print in your mother tongue is tricky enough, but in another language, it is a total nightmare!).  This covers the property, us and the holiday makers plus has a public liability provision. Another certificate I’m sure will be necessary in the future is the one from your air conditioning engineer regarding annual service of all air con units.  We ensure we use a properly registered engineer and have a full invoice with his tax number displayed as required under Spanish law. If we had gas appliances I would be anticipating needing to produce your invoice showing the annual service of those fixtures too, but we are all electric.

We also have a fire extinguisher, fire blanket and smoke alarms on each level.  We display our evacuation plan and provide the emergency number with a multi-lingual service.  What we cannot do is ensure that our guests actually read any of this clearly displayed information!

In addition to the information we must display, (we use the back of the front door as a notice board), we duplicate this information in the ‘house folder’ which also contains additional information on the house, the keyholders, washing machine instructions, internet access codes, TV stations, info on the area, directions to the supermarket and beach etc, bus timetables, 24 hour pharmacy, driving in Spain information, matters of personal safety, English speaking radio stations and a few other miscellaneous items.  But we know that despite saying in the welcome letter sent out before the holiday that they should read the contents of the folder, guests don’t look at it! How do we know? From phone calls, emails and text messages asking for information that is detailed in the folder! So, complying with all the rules doesn’t actually mean the guests will take notice of anything, but we must still do what is required of us.

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Utilities in Spain

We are often asked about the utilities in Spain.  If you buy in a town you will almost certainly have mains water but if you have a villa on the edge of or outside the main town you may not have mains sewage but have a septic tank instead.  This surprises a lot of people but in parts of Spain this is normal.  If you buy a rural property you may not have mains water but use a private well or have water delivered by tanker to fill your huge storage tank.

 

Generally mains water is of drinkable quality these days, gone are the days when you had to buy it bottled.  To get around shortages of water there are now a number of desalination plants around the coast taking sea water and cleaning it up for local use.  There are also a number of reservoirs now that are also small hydro-electric plants.  Water supply in the Alicante region doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.

 

Gas has until recently been bottled only in most areas but towns are slowly having mains gas installed.  Again this surprises many Brits looking to buy in Spain, and of course using bottles of gas for central heating is pretty expensive.  Using portable gas heaters is common practice and fairly economical too.  Modern air conditioning units have settings for cooling or heating and are sufficient for use in a bedroom, although not necessarily that cheap to run.

 

For many years Iberdrola were the only electricity company but in recent years de-regulation has allowed competition and there are now other options.  Also duel tariffs are available too now, so cheap electricity at night and in the morning with a slightly raised rate for the afternoon and evening means savings can be made.  Solar has come a long way too and with 320 days of sunshine a year in south Costa Blanca developers now include solar in their new build homes.

 

There are a few ‘anomalies’ that I have come across over the years.  For instance, where our house is located the water company are also responsible for collecting the rubbish so instead of the cost of rubbish collection being included in the local council tax it is added to your water bill instead!

 

 

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My family abroad: The Big Move

The big move

As Mum and Dad were moving full-time to Spain they decided to sell up the UK home, releasing funds for their retirement years.   Having put most of their belongings into store they moved into a small furnished flat for their last couple of months in England.  Within a week of Dad’s 60^th birthday cum retirement party they headed for Moraira, but not to their own villa.  Instead they stayed up the road at the neighbour’s new villa, completed but not yet lived in, to oversee their own being built.   There were many funny stories we heard over the coming weeks and months, most long since forgotten, but some still stick in the memory.

I do remember was how Dad arrived at the villa to meet the builder one day to find no workman there, when asked where they all were the builder simply replied that “the oranges are ready”.  It transpired that most of the workforce had family owned citrus groves and the perfect time had arrived for the oranges to be harvested so the workman had gone to the family homes to help with the fruit picking!  The builder assured Dad the workman would be back as soon as the oranges were gathered in, and they were but not for two weeks.  This also happened with other citrus fruits, almonds and olives!   I don’t think that would be tolerated these days, but it was considered perfectly reasonable at the time.

Then the time Mum was puzzled when looking around one of the bathrooms as there was no waste pipe for the toilet.  Mum did not speak Spanish and I’m told there was great hilarity as Mum enacted what she was trying to convey (!) but once the man understood he made a few measurements then hit the floor with a heavy hammer revealing the top of the waste pipe that had been concreted over by accident!

And the time towards the end of the build when Dad pointed out a socket was missing.  The builder opened the connection box on the wall and poured a coloured liquid in and waited without saying a word.  A few minutes later a coloured patch appeared on the wall and he calmly took a hammer and hit the patch opening up the plastered over socket location!

Mum and Dad finally moved into the villa about 6 months later, the underbuild wasn’t finished, the gardens were not planted and there were still many small jobs to be completed but they were more than happy to be finally in their own home in the sun.

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My family abroad: Mum and Dad’s villa plans

Dad retired at 60, just over four years after they bought their plot of land.  They had chosen the plan for the villa, taking one of the builder’s standard designs and modifying, extending and altering it in numerous ways to suit their needs.  Oddly their UK neighbours also chose the same basic design and also modified it so that by the time the two houses were finished they were quite different.

The main living area was a three bedroom single storey villa which formed the upper floor, reached by a set of stairs build around the curved front of the villa.  As the hill sloped away another lower floor (or underbuild) was created which Mum and Dad would use as the garage, utility room and huge games room with a full size table tennis table, darts area and table and chairs, with doors to a covered outside bar, barbeque area and lower garden.  (The future owners would convert this into a separate, independent apartment for guests.)  The pool was on the main living area level and above that was another garden with petanque courts and fruit trees, and above that two further high level gardens for cacti.

Their friend’s house also had the main living area on the top floor, although this was slightly below street level.  They too had a utility area and garage in the floor below but as their plot was steeper they also had another underbuild below that which in time the friend’s turned into a home cinema with the rock of the hillside protruding into the room on one side as a feature!  Below that was the pool and garden – it was a long way down from the house terrace to the pool, if I remember correctly it was well over 40 stairs!  I think that was possibly my first lesson learnt about buying in Spain – find a reasonably a level plot if you intend staying there into your old age!

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My family abroad: Costa Blanca

My family abroad:  Costa Blanca

In the 80’s my parents begun looking around Spain for the area they considered most suitable for their own retirement.  Dad had always said he would like to retire somewhere warm, Mum was less sure about the idea but agreed to look – the extra holidays were a bonus and she had always loved looking around show houses anyway!  Having holidayed in various locations in Spain and other Mediterranean countries and islands they first considered the Balearics, but soon decided that mainland Spain would be their best option.  They checked out the Costa del Sol market but settled on North Costa Blanca as they both loved the dramatic scenery.

The Ap7 motorway from Alicante airport going north had yet to be built but was planned, so each trip they had to travel through Alicante city, along the coast road (the N332) through eajoyosa, Altea, Calpe, , then either head slightly inland before reaching Javea and Denia or turn off to follow the minor windy coast road to Moraira.  Dad loved Moraira on the first visit.  Back in the early/mid 80’s it wasn’t the slick up-market resort it was later to brand itself – sometimes referred to as the jewel in the crown of the Costa Blanca by estate agents in the early 2000’s.  The town centre was small, old, and typically Spanish, a little tired and quiet.   In fact, Dad once described it as ‘a bit like being in the wild west’!

They recalled the tale of how they stayed in a rather shabby hotel in town and Dad announced this was where he wanted to live.  Mum was not enamoured at all!   However she agreed that IF they could find the right house she would be prepared to ‘give it 5 years’.  Dad was still five years off retirement (which he would take at 60) so there was plenty of time, Mum figured, to change his mind!  Several trips later they concluded that the only way to get the house they wanted was to have one built so they started to hunt for a plot of land in Moraira.

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My family abroad: The beginning

My aunt and uncle were the first people in the family to buy a property in Spain.  In the mid 80’s they bought an apartment on the Costa del Sol, a small Spanish fishing town called Fuengirola near Malaga.  I didn’t visit there until 2012 and by then it had grown to a huge and very busy town busting with people.  Initially they bought the apartment as a holiday home, about 10 minutes’ walk to the marina/port area in a small apartment block overlooking a park.  Their neighbours were all Spanish, they had deliberately avoided an ex-pat community.

My aunt and uncle worked hard on learning Spanish as they intended to integrate as much as possible into the local community when they moved there in their retirement.  They had a neighbour in the UK whose sister had moved to the town in the 60’s with her daughters and the lady, Doreen, agreed to look after the apartment while they were in England.  They had several years of visiting the apartment before their retirement and it was on one such trip that they took my widowed Grandad with them.  I was told that when he and Doreen met it was love at first sight!  There cannot be many who emigrate at the age of 86 years old but before my aunt and uncle retired my Grandfather packed his bags and moved to Fuengirola to be with Doreen, who was only a couple of years older than my Dad.

Not that long after my aunt and uncle moved permanently to Spain.  Grandad stayed after Doreen passed away, spending his last few weeks in a Spanish nursing home at almost 95 years old.  My uncle passed away a few years later but my aunt has stayed, still in the same apartment, and now in her early 80‘s is still active and leads a busy life in her adopted country.

Also in the 80’s my parents were visiting various parts of Spain, searching for a place they felt they wanted to call home.  And so my family abroad had begun.

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Memories of a young Traveller - Don’t drink the water!

Don’t drink the water!

There was once a (rather bad) sitcom named that.  But in actual fact back in the 60’s and 70’s the tap water in Spain, even in the hotels, wasn’t of drinking quality.  Although none of my family experienced problems we did hear of others who suffered tummy upsets.  Buying water in a bottle was another new experience, the UK didn’t have shelves of bottled water in the supermarkets in those days.  Trying to clean your teeth without swallowing the tap water was another new experience too and one as a 5 year old I remember as being rather tricky.

As we didn’t use tap water we didn’t have orange squash either, something all British children drank at that time.  And there was no lemonade, it was orangeade or cola or fizzy lemon.  To a child this was very strange.  And another daily drink missing was fresh milk, so no warm milky drink at bedtime.  Milk came in strange cartons and tasted funny because it was treated so it didn’t have to be refrigerated, (fridges were a luxury item still).  To a child used to full cream milk in bottles delivered by the milkman before breakfast daily it was all a bit odd.  In those days we still had cold milk at school too at morning break time, a third of a pint if I remember correctly.

And there was wine!  Wine was not allowed for 5 year olds but it seemed the Spanish consumed vast amounts and it was very cheap and available everywhere at any time.  In 60’s Britain wine was drunk at a dinner party, bought from a local off licence that could only open for a few restricted hours a day and certainly wasn’t cheap.

And another strange food was olive oil, copious amounts used on the food that was presented.  It tasted odd, sort of nutty and fruity at the same time.  My grandad complained about it being greasy but the food wasn’t greasy.  We had no idea it was healthy and would one day be a mainstay in British cooking too.  Can you imagine certain TV chef’s reactions if they were told they couldn’t use any olive oil – they would have to completely re-write their cookery books!

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Memories of a young traveller Childhood Spain-Barcelona

Childhood Spain - Barcelona

One year we stayed close to Barcelona.  To be honest my strongest memory of this holiday was that it was quite unremarkable!  I know I met a fun bunch of people and spent hours in the pools messing about with my friends.  Our parents got on well but it wasn’t a friendship that was to last much beyond the holiday.  The beach wasn’t the best either, the sea becoming too deep for me quickly and the waves were large, so we stayed around the pool at lot.  The food was different too to that eaten on the islands and further south.

My strongest memory is of the excursion into Barcelona, a city with unique architecture and atmosphere.  It’s Spanish, but not quite so, due to the strength of the Catalonian culture.  Franco was still in charge on my childhood visit so the city residents were supposed to speak Castellano, the national language, but Catalan could still be defiantly heard.   After touring the city, of which from that visit I remember surprising little, we visited the famous Barcelona football ground.  Stood near the top of the stand looking down on the pitch it would be fair to say that as a non-fan of the game I was decidedly underwhelmed by the experience.  One memory stands out clearly, the pride with which we were told this pitch had the ‘greenest grass in Spain’ – as a child from the UK I just couldn’t understand why I was supposed to be impressed by the stuff that grew the same colour in my own back garden!

Many years later I returned to the city, this time with Dave, and it had a totally different effect on me.  The Catalan culture and language plus its unique architecture give Barcelona a very different feel to the Costa Blanca.  It is a city I intend to visit again one day.

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Memories of a young traveller Childhood Spain – Sunburn and donkeys and coach trips

Childhood Spain – Sunburn and donkeys and coach trips

We didn’t use sun screen in those days, we used oil on our bodies.  No one worried about skin cancer and getting sunburnt was just part of the holiday.  We used large amounts of ‘after sun’ to cool our hot skin every evening.  We even laughed about how red we were and how you could spot the new arrivals as they were so pale or so pink.  I blistered on several holidays on my shoulders and back, but it was never considered a concern – how times have changed.

Highlights of the package holidays were the excursions.  Early in the holiday you would select your choices and on the appropriate day we would pile onto the coach with our hotel issued paper bag containing out packed lunch.  We visited caves with underground lakes, old Spanish villages that clung precariously to the hillside, waterfalls of icy mountain snow melt, vineyards with bodegas, potteries and glass blowing factories, to name just a few of the trips.  At each we would buy souvenirs that would take pride of place back home on the mantle until our next holiday.

I collected a huge array of Spanish dolls dressed as Flamenco dancers, all sizes and colours, taking at least one home each year.  Each year at least one person boarding the plane would be carrying a two foot high donkey wearing a sombrero, wondering why it had seemed such a good idea to buy it!  But to me that was a symbol of the Spain I knew and loved – donkeys wearing sombreros pulling carts.  Privately owned cars were few are far between in the rural areas in the 60’s and early 70’s, people used bicycles, donkey and cart or walked.  Spain was a relatively poor country and the roads were full of potholes and bumps.  The other common sight on the roads were old tractors – rusty, noisy and belting out black fumes – but pulling a cart in which sat the family.

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Memories of a young traveller Childhood Spain – friends

Childhood Spain – friends

It seemed each year we met a particular family that became our friends, some for just the holiday but some became long-term friendships, a few even life-long for my parents.  In fact we remained friends long enough for me to attend at least two weddings of my childhood holiday friends.

On one visit to Majorca our new friends had two children with whom we later holidayed again a couple of years later in Ibiza and when teenagers we hired a couple of boats on the Norfolk Broads.  Their son was two years older than me and one very bored siesta time, when we were supposed to be resting away from the heat of the day, about ages 8 and 6, I remember sitting with him on the balcony trying to aim Spanish Smarties (that didn’t taste that nice) at unsuspecting sunbathers four floors below!  Fortunately we were never found out!

One year we met a family on the plane and got chatting.  Their youngest daughter, Tracey, was a year younger than me and we became firm friends.  It was a friendship that was to last many years and as teenagers we visited each other’s houses for holidays without our parents, she lived in a very rural location in the Cotswolds and I in suburbia in Surrey, and we both envied the other’ one’s location!

That particular holiday when I met Tracey there was a children’s fancy dress competition, the catch being that all the costumes need to be made from crepe paper, which the hotel supplied in reams of all colours.  My sister, Tracey and I entered as ‘The Three Bears’ in wonderful costumes made by Tracey’s mum (who was a good seamstress) and I had a notice written on card saying ‘The Three Bears’ hung around my neck.  I was the middle size so I was Mummy Bear.  The winner was a ‘fried egg’(!) and we came second, but were announced as ‘The Three Blind Mice’.  And our runner-up prize?  One pair of swimming arm bands to share between the three of us!

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Memories of a young traveller Flying

Memories of a young traveller

Flying

Spain is a place of happy childhood holidays.  Our first visit was the week following my 5^th birthday and Spain was exciting and different, and the beginning of a life-long love.  I’d been on planes before, we flown to Northern Ireland regularly, sometimes twice a year.  Dad had friends and business clients who owned a hotel and an early memory for me was one cold Easter helping clear snow from car windscreens with my older sister while standing on some sort of box so I could reach.  We would have our tea in the kitchen early as we were so young, and got told off for running around the hallways, all the staff knew us.

We toured Ireland too; it was there I first rode a horse, first threw pennies into a wishing well and nearly got washed into the Atlantic by a freak wave.  We always had a holiday somewhere in England as well but my Mum longed for warm sunshine and package holidays to Spain had just begun, so Spain it was.

When flying to Ireland as a toddler I have a clear memory of worrying about the propellers spinning off and Dad reassuring me they couldn’t.  So my first memory of seeing a plane with jet engines is wondering where the propellers had gone!  No propellers was very worrying!

I wasn’t a ‘good traveller’, in fact I’m still not, plagued by motion sickness and ear problems all my life, flying can be a painful and unpleasant experience, but planes get me from A to B quickly and boats just make me feel ill for longer!  My parents and fellow travellers must have been very patient with me.

Spain in the 60’s didn’t have high rise buildings, air conditioning, kiss me quick hats, larger louts, fish and chips or pubs.  What it did have was terrible roads, strange food, lots of donkeys in hats pulling carts along dusty tracks, hot sunshine, warm sea and wonderfully friendly people.  We seemed a very long way from England or Ireland that first visit – to me, a little 5 year old, we had entered a whole new world.

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