Diary of a Downshifter – Part 14 Downshifting to Spain
After 18 happy months in Finca Granadero we decide to move on. There was no rational explanation for this other than the fact that we had got itchy feet and I wanted to live nearer Gibraltar and in better bee country. We looked for many properties in an area stretching from Rhonda down to Gib and finally found a small hut situated down a steep, near vertical slope. The views were amazing. From the sitting room we could see Gibraltar and over the Straits we could see the African shore dominated by the other pillar of Hercules, Jebel Musa or Musa’s mountain. (Gibraltar is a corruption of Jebel Tarik or Tarik’s Mountain. Musa and Tarik were the Muslim generals that first invaded Spain under the Caliph and brought Islam to Spain for over 700 years). Below us was a huge valley populated with cork oak trees and cattle through which ran the Victorian rail line put in by the British in the 1800s from Algeciras to Rhonda, and to our left we could view the Rhonda mountains dotted with small white villages all with Arabic names. At night, these same villages looked like small jewels sparkling in the dark mountains. To our extreme right we saw the brooding presence of Castellar itself, a Moorish castle which housed the main part of the village and which also housed an exceptional bar.
However, we first had to sell Finca Granadero and arrange to stay in it until the birth of our daughter. We used the original etate agent but also went about this by placing an ad in a German newspaper to see if there was any foreign interest. Knowing no German we asked a neighbour to write the ad for us stating that we wanted the Deutchmark equivalent of 6 million pesetas (we had bought the house for 4 million). Due to a mix up in numbers the ad put it at 8 million and that’s what we got. A very nice couple came to see it and fell in love with it immediately. They did not intend to live in it permanently or immediately and so we were able to stay in it until March 1995 when our duaghter was two weeks old.
In the meamntime I had gone down to our proposed new place to assess it for alteration and to get some ideas from a French friend of mine (a builder) and an English friend about altering the new hovel to make it fit for a family to live in. After a very successful day out we returned to find that our houses had been evacuated due to the approach forest and scrub fires. When my wife and others had phoned the fire brigade, they were unable to respond quickly due to most of them being in bars watching on televisions Spain playing in a world cup match. Eventually they turned up however and the house and surrounds was saved.
