When it’s so pavement-meltingly hot, you’re always on the look out for a variety of ways to quench your thirst. Endless botellines of icy cold water and all known brands of burp-inducing fizzy stuff aside, non-alcoholic options include Nestea, chilled chocolate milk, cafe con hielo (iced coffee), bottled fruit juice (way too thick and syrupy […]

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Looking at this photo you could be forgiven for thinking it was taken in the Caribbean: all that dazzling white and turquoisey-blue, and the water so clear that you can see your toenails need repainting. Then you look back across the fine soft sands and see that the trees are pine, not palm. Then you […]

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Getting on for two decades ago, I stepped off a plane in the fantastically-atmospheric, fantastically-wet city of Santiago de Compostela. I’d come to take up an English teaching post at a language academy. I knew nothing about Spain, even less about Galicia. Having returned to the UK, after several years spent working and living in […]

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I recently attended the opening of the Málaga Wine Museum. It wasn’t the most sensible time to hold it - at 1.30 in the afternoon - on one of the most sandal-meltingly hot days I’ve ever experienced anywhere in the world. Still, once we’d got through the six (yes six!) opening speeches while squashed inside […]

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Summer’s here and the time is right … for eating lots of gazpacho, among other things. Mid-June the temperature shot up overnight and we woke up sweating under a laughably-named ’summer duvet’. Out came the fans, off came the bedclothes - and all other clothes, too.
Oven-hot is the only way to describe the weather when […]

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You may struggle to get your tongue round the word at first, but don’t worry, you’ll be going there a lot so you’ll soon get the hang of it. El Ayuntamiento: The Town Hall. Sounds so grand in English but what comes as a surprise is how just about every tiny pueblo has its very […]

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The first time we toured Morocco by car we were struck by how many pedestrians there were. Everywhere. In the middle of nowhere. They were poor and had no transport. There were either no buses or they couldn’t afford the ticket. We regularly picked up entire families, squashing them into the back of our van, […]

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I must be one of the few expats in Spain not to have satellite TV. When I arrived in my late 20’s I was too busy partying and enjoying the ‘marcha‘ (the action, the night-life) to worry about soaps and sitcoms, and besides I was a penniless TEFL teacher and the flat I shared didn’t […]

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 I’ve just come back from a four-day break in Vera Playa. Vera Playa, in case you didn’t know, is a sort of naturist resort on the coast of Almeria.
Apart from the four-star naturist hotel, there is a large residental area signposted ‘Zona Naturista’, where over half a dozen urbanisations are specifically geared to holidaymakers who […]

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Over my journalistic years I’d interviewed countless expats about their dream homes. Out the mantras would come. “We just knew it was the one.” “It felt right.” “As soon as we saw it, that was it.”
Any capacity for critical thinking went out the window, and the love affair began. Three years ago when we stepped […]

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