All Change on the Costa
Even a five-hour delay at Gatwick couldn't dampen the euphoria of pitching up at 4am at my Spanish house last month. Somewhere among the smell of a hot pine and jasmine-scented night, the buzz of crickets and the sight of the mountains in crisp silhouette against a dark blue sky, my mind was transported - quicker than Proust could muse about a Madeleine - back to my first holiday on the Costa del Sol 30 years ago.
My mother first took me there in 1977, when I was five. It was the year of Spain's first democratic elections after nearly four decades of Franco. I recall us watching the new head of state, Juan Carlos, on television, thinking he seemed very nice and down-to-earth for a king. I rode a donkey through the backstreets of Mijas, tasted wine (or maybe something more child-friendly) poured from a great height from a long-stemmed porrón. And I sat on the roof tiles of the whitewashed house we rented in the village of Torreblanca, looking across empty fields towards one or two isolated tower blocks on the coast.
Five years ago, soon after my mother died, I drove back to try to find that house. I couldn't even find Torreblanca. Eventually, I tracked it down, engulfed by the sprawl of Fuengirola, our white house now unidentifiable among hundreds of others. Yet the pull to return has always been there. The coast feels like a second home in the truest sense. Stepping out at Málaga airport - currently in the throes of vast expansion - is as familiar to me as entering my local train station in London. And despite vast changes on the Costa del Sol over the past 30 years, some things remain reassuringly the same.
Today, that donkey's descendants are still hulking tourists around Mijas, the backstreets unchanged from when I was a child. Except back then, you would have been a pioneer if you had headed into the old town and handed over £5,000 for an old townhouse. Now, you can choose from scores of agents to sell you a similar house for about £150,000 or a nearby villa for a few million. The average property on the coast now costs £213,000 - the same as in Britain.
And Fuengirola, the resort where Spanish mass tourism began, has become a magnet for all who visit the coast. Many of those among the influx of package holidaymakers in the 1960s and 1970s joined the first mass influx of British migrants looking to retire to the sun in the 1980s.
Fuengirola was the chosen destination for the majority. It's a town that may now be scorned for its all-day fry-up culture, but you can still buy a frontline beach studio apartment there for £80,000, and behind the seafront is a charming Spanish town of shady squares and shops that shut all afternoon. The two worlds coincide only on the most superficial level, in brief exchanges in supermarkets, bars and restaurants, which is how the entire coast ticks along.
Back in 1970, there were 30,000 registered foreign and Spanish home-owners in Marbella, says Christopher Clover, MD of one of Marbella's longest-established estate agency, which opened that year. Now, holiday-home owners swell that figure to a population of about 500,000 in peak season, adds Mr Clover, with some 15,000-20,000 British people buying on the Costa del Sol each year.
Precise figures are impossible to pin down because so many foreign homeowners are not registered. But the Andalusian government lists 88,188 Britons as officially resident in the region, compared with 26,665 in 2000, and, taking an average of all the estimates, somewhere between 180,000-250,000 Britons own property in Andalusia.
Including me. I recently bought a whitewashed house in the old village of Ojén in the hills behind Marbella. The beaches, English-speaking restaurants and multi-million pound villas are 10 minutes away, but in Ojén you won't get to know your neighbours if you don't speak Spanish: the plumber charged me £3 to sort out my sink, and tapas in the square cost 40p.
My tall, narrow, two-bedroom house, set across five storeys with a terrace that looks to the sea, cost £145,000. Reasonable, I thought, given average two-bed apartments down the road in Marbella cost from £250,000, but a tremendous 4,000 per cent mark-up for the English vendor, Peter Bond, who bought the house in 1979 for £3,500.
"I had £6,000 to spend and thought I could get a lovely flat in Marbella for that. I was quite depressed to realise I couldn't buy much at all. I hadn't noticed prices rising," he tells me. "When I moved to Ojén, it took 16 months to get a phone installed and I was the only English person in the village for the next decade." As founder of the Marbella Times, the first free newspaper in Spain, in 1979, he hobnobbed with the coast's stream of holidaying celebrities from Sean Connery to Shirley Bassey in decadent 1970s and 1980s Marbella.
Mr Bond also witnessed the coast's most greed-driven and lawless years. "In the 1970s, a friend of mine bought an old house with some land in Puerto Banús when it was nothing for £11,000," he recounts. "About 10 years ago, Jesus Gil, the notorious mayor of Marbella, wanted to buy it from her to develop the land. My friend refused to sell, so Gil bulldozed it one day when she was out. She took him to court, but he preferred to settle his own way, turning up one day with a suitcase containing £800,000." The coast has gained an unfortunate reputation for corruption. The huge White Whale money-laundering operation of 2005, which exposed tens of thousands of illegally built properties, vies with the loathsome TV series Marbella Belles for the best PR drive to keep buyers away. But the city has since cleaned up its act with its new mayor, Angeles Muñoz, keen to restore Marbella's image.
"Marbella is the jewel in the crown of Spanish tourism," says David Honeyman, Managing Director of a successful real estate company based in Marbella. "You can't get permission to build a garden shed there without paperwork now. Ironically, Marbella has become one of the safest places on the coast to buy today because no lawyer or bank will touch a property that they don't think is 100 per cent safe."
Mr Honeyman moved to the Costa del Sol in 1987, when "property was like a cottage industry", he says. "There were no big estate agents. Everything was pretty unprofessional, disorganised and done on a handshake."
Competition from cheaper destinations such as Bulgaria has partly caused the slowdown in the Spanish property market in the past two years, but Mr Honeyman is confident Spain will win out in the end. "I think Spain will become fashionable again," he says. "The price gap between Spain and emerging markets is closing and people are realising that Spanish property comes with the fringe benefits of a great infrastructure and a lifestyle you can adapt to easily," he says. "This is one place where you can live all year round. That's where it will always win."
The coast's frenetic, money-grabbing years may have come to a temporary halt, but that may be no bad thing. Many of the worst agents have disappeared and the general view is that this is a natural blip in the cycle after several boom years, and normality will be restored within the next year or so.
"The property market slowdown is due to perception rather than real economic issues. Prices aren't going down. It's price growth that has fallen from 18 per cent to around 6 per cent," says Eugenio Sánchez-Ramade García-Conde, managing director of Noriega UK "The coast will never lose its physical attributes, and tourism - the first source of residential purchases - is increasing. The indicators are all very positive."
'We're going there five times this year'
For all the Costa del Sol's bad press, I rarely hear a disgruntled holidaymaker when I'm there. From people on cut-price package deals to couples renting lavish villas, they all say how wonderful it would be to own a place there. Yet liking the Costa del Sol is almost a guilty pleasure.
Its image is so tarnished in the UK that admitting to owning a home there comes with a built-in defence mechanism. "It's 10 minutes from Marbella," I've found myself gabbling, "but it's still very Spanish. It's nothing like Marbella…"
This is an extract taken from an article that appeared in The Daily Telegraph, September 1st 2007 by Zoe Dare Hall.