I suppose it was about ten years ago when we first started thinking about buying a property in Spain – a holiday home that we would intend to visit for two or three weeks of the year. Over the following years, at weekends, we would trail numerous property exhibitions organised by the big estate agencies. But back then, like with many others, owning a home abroad turned out to be only a dream, as the visits to the exhibitions were as far as we got and we never took that step further.

But about five years ago, on visiting yet another of these property exhibitions, we actually booked on to a four day inspection trip to the Costa Blanca (an area of Spain that we knew absolutely nothing about).

In the months following that inspection trip, our views about the apartment being just a holiday home changed rapidly. My husband and I both held professional jobs, he was a Personnel Manager and had been with the same company for over twenty years and I was a full time Lecturer in Further Education. We had come to the stage where we had had enough of working long hours, were feeling the stresses and strains of our professions and

We arrived in Spain in March 2003. Previous to leaving the UK we had made plans to work as agents for the company who we had purchased our property through, but this fell through. At the ages of 47, we were both too young to retire (and neither wanted to!), so having settled into our new home the next task was to find work. Although escaping from the stresses of work back home, we still wanted work that was both challenging and rewarding. We didn’t have to do much searching as the answer was right there on our doorstep - we were living in an area with beautiful blue flag

About eighteen months into our new venture we branched out into new avenues. Our experiences of buying a property abroad were not positives ones and we were sure that we could offer prospective buyers a more professional and personalised service than that which we (and many others) had endured and so we branched out into property sales. 

We soon found it difficult to manage both the rental and the sales side of the business so decided to sell on the Holiday Rental aspect of the business.

We now had the double task of finding a suitable location to open up an estate agency and a suitable location to live. And so we spent many weekends travelling the countryside searching for a suitable venue. One day we stumbled upon a quaint little village called Abanilla in the heart of Murcia. We fell in love with this beautiful little village and decided that this was where we were now going to base our business and find a new home.

The move from coast to country has indeed been an interesting - and challenging one! The way of life in this “real Spain” is in total contrast to that on the coast. Here, it seems, time has stood still.