Holiday Homes
Building a house in Andalucia
Stefan Lindon from Brighton describes his experience of buying and building a home in inland Andalucia
My whole experience of buying a piece of land and building a property in Spain has been founded on a series of lucky coincidences. In October 2005, I got on an aeroplane for a holiday in Andalucia that was supposed to last for two weeks – but sitting next to me on the plane was a British woman who lived in the town I was visiting. She offered me a job, one thing led to another, and I ended up living on an organic olive farm in the mountains west of Granada, in a place that – for me – approximated closely to paradise.
Some weeks later my partner, Dianne, came to stay for a holiday, and we decided that we loved the area so much we wanted to buy there. It's an absolutely beautiful place – the people are friendly, the climate is simply fantastic (blue skies 90 per cent of the time) and the mountains are just unbelievably beautiful. There are virtually no new builds in the area that we were looking in, so we had a choice of renovating a 'finca' – an old cottage – or buying a piece of land. At this point, fate intervened. I was working alongside a builder part-time, and he heard of a piece of land that had come up for sale in the village of Loja, west of Granada and a couple of hours drive from the coast. It's a very traditional Spanish village, and very beautiful. I loved the idea of being able to choose exactly where I wanted to live and what house I wanted to live in.
The land cost 70,000 euros and the buying process was simple. We employed a Spanish lawyer who spoke perfect English, and the whole thing took only a few weeks from finding the perfect plot to signing the title deeds. Of course, the land didn't have planning permission. However, out here you can get automatic permission for a 25-square-metre 'work cottage' if you own a piece of land. At the moment, Junta Andalucia, the local governing body, is currently having an amnesty on new builds, which basically means that, if you pay three year's worth of council tax, your property is automatically legal. Council tax is around 70 euros per year.
Building the property itself was an incredibly stressful experience. We made the bad decision to employ a British builder, who didn't have a clue what he was doing. He initially quoted us 30,000 euros and said that the one bedroom house was going to take six weeks to construct, but it ended up being around two to three months and he kept asking us for more money. He even threatened to smash up the house if we wouldn't pay him another 1,000 euros! Many British expats employ a Spanish builder and then engage a site-manager to oversee the work. That's what I would do if I was going to build again, or if I wasn't able to be in Spain full-time. The other problem we had is with a farmer who had a mule-track access through our land. He decided he wanted to widen it, and drove a bulldozer through our property without permission, destroying seven of our almond trees! We had to denounce him five times to the Guardia Seville before our complaint was acknowledged, and now he is being charged in a criminal court. We're told that we will be given around 100,000 euros in compensation. This makes it all sound very problematic, but in spite of all the difficulties, we couldn't be more thrilled with the house.
This is the most beautiful part of the world that I've ever seen, and our house is now worth around 140,000 euros due to the position and the area. We can't wait to begin extending and improving it so we can go through the whole process again!
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