Record
high in stampede out of the UK
Graham Forster may have come to Spain partly in search of the sun, but sea and
sand can’t have had too much to do with it. The pretty Andalusian village
where he has settled is a 40-minute drive from the coast – or would have
been had I been able to find the winding road to it on my map.
Eschewing the concrete costas and looking inland, the 49-year-old Liverpudlian
watchmaker found a perfect place to settle in Álora, a whitewashed village
in the shadow of an ancient hilltop castle. “I wanted the Spanish lifestyle,
rather than Little England in the sun,” he explains, taking a rest from
fixing clocks in the afternoon heat.
Five years ago, he moved here with his family and enrolled his son Jonathan
and daughter Jessica in the local school. After four years of lessons and
considerable help from his neighbours, Forster felt that his Spanish was
good enough to open his own shop, which serves Brits and Spaniards in equal
measure. “This is it now,” he says decisively. “We’re staying here for good.”
Álora is one of dozens of remote Spanish villages where Britons have settled
in recent years. Far removed from the British enclaves on the coast, many of
these latest settlers are becoming involved with their adopted villages to
an extent their predecessors never dreamt of. But it is a slow and uncertain
process with a looming catch: the more of their compatriots arrive, the
harder it will be to integrate.
Even so, the latest and most intrepid wave of Britons to settle in Spain is
challenging deeply-ingrained stereotypes of the dreaded “Brit abroad”. For a
start, they aren’t all pensioners. “I think the traditional image of the
retired Brit coming to live in the sun is diminishing,” says Bruce McIntyre,
the British consul in Málaga. “The normal person who used to come here and
live on their state pension can’t now afford to do so.”
Instead, he sees younger people moving over with their families, often
entrepreneurial types with successful businesses in the UK. In short, the
sort of person who is more likely to make a go of Spanish life, and not just
wanting to live out their final years in the sunshine.
“I think the newer generation are integrating more,” McIntyre says, looking at
his assistant for confirmation. “Yes, a lot of them are intermarrying,”
agrees Rosslyn Crotty, who has lived in the region for 30 years. “There
still is a lot of Brit-marrying-Brit. But there are also a lot marrying
Spanish nationals now.” It is impossible to say with any certainty how many
British live in Spain. Most do not register with their local authorities,
often for fear of attracting the attention of the tax-man. That said, the
estimates are huge – and growing at an impressive pace.
The UK Foreign Office works under the assumption that more than 1 million
Britons are living most or all of the year in Spain – a huge number in a
country of 45 million people. In dozens of towns and villages across the
sunny south and west of the country, Britons now outnumber Spanish residents
by a wide margin.
Recent surveys suggest that there is no shortage of others willing to make the
move. In 2005, an average of 2,000 people moved away permanently from the UK
each week, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research. Spain was
the most-popular destination after Australia.
The latest official figures reveal that 315,000 Britons are registered with
their local Spanish authority, giving them the right to vote in local
elections. That figure is rising by 15 to 20 per cent a year. For the first
time, Spanish politicians are starting to court the British vote in local
elections. In places such as Majorca and Alicante province, Britons are
themselves being elected as local officials; one town has even had a British
deputy mayor.
Karen O’Reilly, a British anthropologist, conducted a now-famous study into
The British on the Costa del Sol. During her fieldwork in Fuengirola
15 years ago, she found that the British and Spanish hardly mixed at all.
“If you could draw it,” she says, “you’d have a Venn diagram with very
little overlap.” On recent trips, however, she has begun to notice tentative
signs of change. “People are now becoming more involved in the Spanish
economy,” she says. “They are learning little bits of Spanish. It’s not a
massive sea-change, but it is changing.”
To be sure, there are still plenty of lobster-red lager boys sporting gold
chains and tattoos on the Costa del Sol. You don’t have to look far to find
pensioners eating tea and cake, or chippies selling saveloys and pickled
eggs. Fuengirola, one of the places where Brits first settled in Spain in
the 1970s, still has shops selling naughty postcards and British bars
bearing poor puns: 007: Licence to Grill, reads one, Live and Let Fry
another.
But that is no longer the whole story. “There are people living in separate
worlds,” says Crotty. “I just don’t think any more that they’re the
majority.”
Britain’s love-affair with Spain began in the late 1960s when General Franco,
the Spanish dictator, began to encourage tourism as a way to bring in
much-needed foreign currency. Working-class families who had for generations
spent their rain-soaked holidays in Blackpool or Skegness flew to Spain on
cheap package holidays, made possible by Britain’s growing economy and the
advent of mass air travel. For many, it was the first time they had been
abroad, not counting the war, and they took their habits with them to the
beach.
By the time Franco died in the mid1970s, resorts such as Benidorm or
Torremolinos were in full swing, and Brits began to look for a way to stay.
For many, that opportunity came in the 1980s, when the Thatcher government
gave them the chance to buy their council houses. Many were able to sell, or
remortgage, their rapidly appreciating council homes and buy far larger
properties in Spain, still far cheaper than Britain at that time. Others,
such as miners or steel-workers, got redundancy payments that stretched far
in the Spain of that era.
Spain also became a popular destination for Britons on the run after the
collapse of the extradition treaty between the two countries in 1978, after
a diplomatic spat over Gibraltar. The figure of the British fugitive, living
it up on the Costa del Sol, became a source of public fascination after
those thought to have been involved in the £6 million Security Express
robbery in 1983 moved there.
Though “Costa del Crime” stories still appear occasionally, they increasingly
read like relics of the 1980s. Today, British criminals are not safe from
extradition – they haven’t been since Spain joined the European Union in
1986.
The Costa del Sol property market slowed in the early 1990s, along with the
British one. But by 1995, it was in the grip of a fresh boom, fuelled by
soaring UK property prices and cheap credit worldwide. Pension problems in
the UK also led many to conclude that any savings were best ploughed into
property – at home and abroad.
“Before, people wanted to own a home in the sun – now it became an investment
frenzy,” recalls Chris McCarthy, managing director of Viva Estates.
A decade of uncontrolled development led people to rename it the Costa del
Crane, and the legacy today is a sprawling Legoland that stretches along
hundreds of miles of Spanish coast. High prices and multiplying corruption
scandals in Marbella have taken their toll, with the property market on the
Costa del Sol again slowing sharply since 2004. Many British buyers have
suddenly found themselves in a nerve-rack-ing position, uncertain whether
their homes were built legally or not.
But behind the scenes, Britons have continued to arrive, moving to different,
cheaper areas and seeking a different kind of life. They are ending up in
places so remote that even the consulate has trouble keeping track of them.
Crotty says: “You can end up in the middle of nowhere, in places that are
hardly more than a dot on the map, and you will find a Brit.” You don’t need
Spanish to get by on the Costa del Sol. The English language paper, SUR in
English, has hundreds of classified ads by Britons offering their services
to other expats. Everything from bars to builders, plumbers, lawyers, and
hairdressers are on hand, and can be hired without ever uttering a word of
Spanish In effect, English has become the lingua franca along great swaths
of the Spanish coast. New technology has also proved to be a double-edged
sword. British immigrants can watch their home football team on Sky Sports.
They can read their home newspaper on the internet and speak by phone with
their relatives for the price of a local call. Low-cost flights whisk people
back to their home regions without having to pass through London, often for
considerably less than the price of a British train.
But increasing numbers of expatriates are finding a way into real Spanish life
– often through that time-honoured British tool of diplomacy: football.
British railway and mining workers brought the game to Spain in the 19th
century and their influence is often still apparent. The oldest football
clubs still have traces of English in their names (it’s Athletic Bilbao, not
Atlético), while Spanish football players still address their coach by the
title: Mister.
Now modern-day British residents are getting involved with Spanish teams,
often surprising locals by becoming their most ardent supporters. British
expatriates on the Costa del Sol have formed a foreign supporters’
association for Málaga FC (officially: the Peña Internacional Malaguista)
and now make up around 10 per cent of the season ticket-holders.
Posters on the back of Málaga buses show international fans dressed in the
team strip under the slogan “The Guiri 11”, using a mildly derogatory
Spanish slang-term for European foreigners. English chants sometimes ring
out in Málaga's stadium.
“It’s a mixed group – Spanish, English. And we’re all there; we’re all part of
it,” says Mercy Chapman, who acts as the Peña’s secretary. “Especially for
someone who doesn’t speak Spanish – and there are many who don’t – they come
just to be immersed in the atmosphere. And for that period of time, they are
just like everybody else.”
Mercy writes a column about Málaga FC in one local English-language newspaper,
her husband, James, for another. Their five children all went to local
Spanish schools and are about as bicultural as you can get, switching
between English and Spanish with ease.
For much of the past 30 years, the English and Spanish communities have
largely ignored each other. Spaniards who grew up in impoverished Andalusian
villages, many of which were almost abandoned in the 1950s, largely accepted
the arrival of so many foreigners as the price of progress.
Mojácar, a seaside town in the parched region where they used to film
spaghetti westerns, is a good example. So few residents were left in this
town in AlmerÍa that, in the 1960s, the Government wanted to close it
altogether. In a last-ditch effort to save it, the mayor started giving away
beachside properties to ambassadors and artists, saving the town by throwing
it open to foreigners. Today, expatriates far outnumber Spanish residents
and the overwhelming majority are British.
Since a large proportion of expats do not register, the town authorities have
to resort to undercover methods to figure out how many people live there.
“We calculate the number of residents by the amount of rubbish collected
every day, by water usage and electricity consumption,” explains Án-gel
Medina, a town councillor.
Like many towns popular with Britons, Mojácar must lay on new services for
expatriates that settle there, such as schools, roads and rubbish
collection. But it receives money for those services based on the number of
registered residents. Medina says it is a problem throughout Andalusia. But
he seems genuinely shocked when asked whether this generated any resentment
among Spanish residents.
“Absolutely not,” he says. “Thanks to the British community, Mojácar has been
able to develop and now people can live here all -year. Everyone is
conscious that, for Mojácar, the arrival of so many foreigners has been a
huge boost.”
Last week, British expatriates even founded the English Bullfighting Club of
Mojácar. “How’s that for integration?” Medina says proudly.
Thirty years after arriving in Spain in force, the British are finally showing
signs of integrating. But it is a patchy and intermittent affair, often
undertaken with great ardour and later abandoned, the process glacially
slow. In short, it is the experience of any immigrant group anywhere. So
perhaps we should also give the Brits abroad a break, even those defiantly
dousing their chips with vinegar on the beach now, for they are very much
the future of Europe.
Charity begins in Spain
Joan Hunt broke out of the British enclaves as a result of real determination.
She moved to Spain with her husband in 1984 after they both retired. They
lived mainly within the confines of the British community. “My husband
couldn’t cope at all with the language,” she says.
The two were in the process of changing insurance policies when her husband
had cancer diagnosed. With no private cover, they were forced to enter the
Spanish public health system. Hunt says that her husband found the hospitals
deeply depressing. After his death in 1991, she began to look into setting
up a hospice for cancer patients, a concept that was unheard of in Spain.
Today, Joan’s Cuidados de Cáncer (Cudeca) charity cares for hundreds of cancer
patients, funded by 560 volunteers who man charity shops and pass around
collecting tins. The shops often seem as if they have been airlifted from a
British high street, complete with lilac dresses, frilly hats and discarded
Mills & Boon collections. But Cudeca is anything but Little England.
Around 85 per cent of the patients are Spanish, and volunteers are of all
nationalities. “There are maybe two or three people who are not Spanish in
the whole organisation,” says Hunt. “We have to be Spanish to succeed.”
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