How to start…

Hello seems as good a place as any.  My name is Jonathan and along with my partner, Paul and our two dogs, Bella and Wilma we’ve made the move from England to southern Spain, Almeria to be precise.  So here I am sat on my sun lounger in the blazing sun writing my first blog post.  

Our story is not that unusual, Paul and I both had fairly well paid jobs in England but like many people in their mid 40’s we wanted more from our lives than just another 20 years sat at a desk in our office, or in Paul’s case another 20 years of driving up and down the country sorting out problems in care homes. 

Alongside our regular jobs Paul and I had set up our own business creating mens facial hair care products, you will have noticed the moustache.  The Dandy Lions Apothecary had been running for about a year when we first started looking for houses and we had strong hopes that we could make this business work from Spain.

We spent the last 2 years looking at houses in the Almeria province having holidayed here a couple of years ago staying at a villa owned by some good friends of ours, Karen and Gary.  I still remember drinking gin and tonic, floating on a lilo on that pool and dreaming about giving it all up and moving to Mojacar.  For those of you that don't know Mojacar is a wonderful white Spanish village built into the side of a mountain.  It is incredibly picturesque, close to the beach and as we soon discovered too expensive for us.  

Our search moved inland.  We spent hours trawling web sites, looking at houses online, often emailing each other house details late at night.  I don’t know if we expected to find our perfect house just be looking online but this fed the dream and after a good year of virtual house hunting we bit the bullet.  We’d found a short list of houses that were with two different Estate Agents based in Albox, we booked our flights, we booked a villa, we hired a car and we booked house viewing appointments.  

That first week of house hunting in Spain was a bit of a revelation, in Norfolk we had been used to driving ourselves to the house and most often being shown round by the vendor.  Not so in Spain, we tipped up at the estate agents office and they took us out to the houses, quite often we would spend a day with one agent being driven from one house the next with the obligatory stop for tapas.  This meant that the agent got to know us and got to know what we liked and what we didn't like and ultimately that was how we ended up at Cortijho Marcello.  

Cortijho Marcello is a wonderfully higgledy piggledy old farmhouse situated in the Almanzora Valley between the two small towns of Cantoria and Fines.  Our house has wonderful views out across the valley towards the Rambla and is surrounded by farm land which is planted with olives, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, figs, in fact all kinds of fruit and nuts.  To get to the house you have to drive down a single track road, thankfully tarmacced that bends round the mountains surrounding the valley.  Needless to say its pretty idyllic.  The only slight blot on this perfect landscape is the marble factory in the far distance but to be honest its not really in our direct line of sight.  

The house itself is big, we have 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, two living rooms and a large kitchen dining space.  We also have a couple of large garages and two workshops attached to the house which for us were pretty important as we ran a small business making artisan soaps in England which we wanted to continue with in Spain. 

We’ve been here 8 weeks and while we wake up some mornings with a slight sense of disbelief we don't regret it for one moment.