Today marks six years since we first ‘discovered’ the Costa Tropical on the coast of Granada. 🌴
What started as a birthday trip would, quite unexpectedly, change the course of our lives.
But let me take you back nine months.
The trip was originally supposed to be for my birthday in March 2020. My birthday just happened to be the day Spain went into lockdown. So instead of celebrating in Granada, we found ourselves confined to the house in Almería, unable to travel anywhere, let alone cross a border.
Fast forward to September that year.
The borders temporarily opened, and we rescheduled our trip. We had been living in a small coastal village on the Almería/Murcia border, a quiet little place for most of the year. Its claim to fame was being the last village in Almería, although that changed when the nearby Geode, the largest publicly accessible one in the world, opened just up the hill behind us.
For a few months each summer, the village came alive. From July to September, its population seemed to quadruple as people arrived for the beautiful sandy beaches and clear water. The rest of the year, life moved at a much slower pace, with a couple of cafés and restaurants and two main bars. Come November, it wasn’t unusual for everyone to gravitate towards whichever one remained open through the winter months.
It was a very different landscape from the one we were about to discover.
The countryside around us was dry and often quite barren, with the occasional flash of green contained within the huge agricultural greenhouses. Just inland were the two little ‘cowboy towns’, another reminder of the very different landscape of the area.
Then we drove towards the Costa Tropical.
And somewhere around the border, the landscape changed.
Suddenly, the dry, dusty scenery gave way to lush green hillsides and fruit trees stretching as far as we could see. The air seemed different. The landscape was greener, softer, more alive.
We were mesmerised.
I had no idea tropical fruit could grow in such abundance in Spain. And perhaps the biggest surprise of all was discovering that all of this was just two and a half hours from where we had been living.
We only stayed for three days.
Three days was enough.
By the time we left, we’d made up our minds.
We were moving.
There was, of course, the small matter of actually making that happen.
By the end of October, we’d rented our house in the village to a lovely local couple and spent November renting from a friend.
Then, on 1 December, we packed up the car, our meagre personal belongings and Charlie, our cat.
Charlie, incidentally, took up almost the entire boot because he would only travel in a very large dog cage. 😆
And then there was us.
Ready to leave for an eight-month rental in Salobreña.
By then, the restrictions on crossing borders had been brought back in, so we also had a letter from the police giving us permission to travel. We set off with that safely tucked in our pocket, heading towards a place we’d only discovered a few months earlier.
And that was that.
Or so we thought.
After that, there was no stopping us.
Our house in the village was eventually sold to a couple from Madrid, and we embarked on a series of rentals in Almuñécar for another nine months.
Then we found the farmhouse between Salobreña and Motril.
Renovations began, and little by little, what had started as a three-day birthday trip became our new life.
And now, six years later, here we are.
Living amongst the very fruit trees that first mesmerised us. Watching the seasons change around us. Picking fruit from trees I didn’t even know could grow in Spain when we first arrived.
It’s funny how life sometimes changes direction without you knowing it at the time.
Six years ago, we thought we were simply going away for a few days to celebrate a birthday.
We had no idea we were driving towards a new home. 🌿
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