Simon and Anne Wilson are not, perhaps, typical of British relocators to Spain. As she surveys their eight acres of terraced hillside in a remote area of Tarragona’s Terra Alta, a winding climb from the Ebro River, Anne says: “We didn’t want to forgo our seasons. We wanted spring, but we did want a real summer, too.”
Understandable, after 13 years running an organic chicken farm on the west coast of Ireland. (Before that they had a snail farm on Anglesey — wiped out in an unusual agricultural catastrophe when a “plague of moles” ate £1,600 worth of breeding stock.) They bought their dilapidated three-room stone house and its land three years ago for the impressively economical sum of €21,000 (£14,500) and moved there 18 months later. “I loved the views — you can see miles to the mountains,” says Anne. “And we don’t mind remoteness: we were three miles from a village in Ireland, and here our nearest neighbour is two and a half miles away.”
The first thing they did was build a temporary wooden house with a wood-burning stove to live in while Simon (who built their Irish home out of straw bales) undertakes the restoration of the wreck into a three-bedroom house with a mezzanine for visiting grandchildren to sleep in. He expects it to be finished by September and within their £14,000 budget.
“Building in stone is very slow,” he explains. “I’m getting stone off the land, from old walls, without robbing the terraces.” He also occasionally employs an English builder who has a team of Romanian workers.
The Wilsons plan to farm their land organically — it already has 400 almond and 40 olive trees — but in the meantime they are looking at a tidy profit from a property investment in the nearby medieval village of Batea. A three-bedroom house they bought for £32,500 last September and rented out is now, after £2,000 of renovation work, on the market for £55,000.
Property in western Tarragona is still relatively cheap, but as more northern Europeans seek a new life in a traditional, unspoilt but accessible corner of Spain, prices are likely to take on the kind of trajectory the Wilsons have seen with their Batea house.
“People who want country property in the Girona area — the villages inland from the Costa Brava — should look here instead,” says Rita Fryer, who covers Catalonia for The Property Finders search agents. “It’s much cheaper, and warmer in winter.” So instead of heading northeast from Barcelona, drive an hour or so southwest. Budget flights to Reus bring the area even closer to British househunters, and there’s talk of a new airport at Castellon, towards Valencia.
From the seaside towns with “a sense of a bit of catching up with the world to do” to the market towns and villages of the Ebro Valley — “not undiscovered, but overlooked” — Fryer thinks the area is “good value at the moment and prices will rise”. This region of Tarragona owes much of its beauty and character to the Ebro, Spain’s longest river, which rises hundred of miles away near Santander and carves a valley of fragrant hillsides planted with olives and almonds and fertile plains of oranges, peaches and cherries, to the rice fields of the delta. Medieval castles built by the Knights Templar dominate strategic bends in the river, and from Bitem, which holds the record for the river’s largest catfish, to the rich bird life of the delta, anglers and twitchers will find plenty to delight them.
The traditional way of life is also attracting overseas buyers, says Helen Rowe of Immobiliaria Rieres in Tortosa, who moved from Exeter to the village of Xerta four years ago. Of her clients, she reckons about 60% are buying with a view to permanent relocation. “People here have time to talk and make you feel welcome,” she says. “It’s a nice warm feeling.”
Though you will have to put in some work on the language. “Catalan (the traditional language of Catalonia, suppressed under the Franco regime but now claiming its place as the dominant language of the province) is the mother tongue of this area. I asked in the village when I first came here: which language should I speak — Catalan or Spanish? They said Catalan, or when we’re chatting we’ll have to switch language when you join in.”
Ebro Valley properties on her books that are within half an hour of Tortosa include a typical casita, or small house, on 14,000sq m planted with olive trees, for £53,000. A grand-looking masia rustica (farmhouse) with land costs £206,000, but she advises it will take double that to do up.
Rowe reckons the trend among her clients is away from buying wrecks. “People are more aware of the restrictions and problems with planning consent.” A “neatly done up” one-bedroom house in the valley near Roquetes with an “unfinished” annexe is on offer at £65,500. An “immaculate” two-bedroom house with a big garage on 41,000sq m of olive groves has a price tag of £103,000. It’s easy, says Rowe, to find a local farmer to take care of the trees if you’re not there, or teach you how to do it for the first couple of seasons.
Rowe also points out that prices drop the further you are into the mountains from the villages of the valley — and the chances of having water from the mains or a community aquifer also drop. The Wilsons are having water delivered while they wait for their application for access to communal agricultural water to be processed. High up on the Coll de l’Alba, where you should offset the spectacular views against the chillier winters, a small finca on 24,000sq m, planted with olives and almonds, is priced at £37,000. Rowe’s stock of properties is lower than usual at the moment, but she thinks that many owners who failed to put their places on the market in spring will use their homes for the summer, then get serious about selling in September.
Rowe took her time about choosing her new home. “I didn’t want to find a house I loved then discover it wasn’t the right area.” She urges me to drive up the C12 — where a stretch of the road runs alongside an old railway line that has now been turned into the Via Verda, a riverside path that runs the length of the valley — and take in the views of timeless hilltop villages and distant mountains to get an idea of why she chose to move to the Ebro Valley.
Detour off the C12 and you will find fruit, eggs, vegetables and bags of snails for sale at garden gates, and slow the pace even further by paying €2 to cross the river on a flimsy-looking cable ferry (two cars at a time) powered by the Ebro’s current and overlooked by the castle of Miravet.
You can get properties with river frontage, says Fryer, who recently found one consisting of a house and a restorable wreck for £125,000.
Village houses are “beginning to attract attention”, says Fryer. Down a narrow street off the main square in Xerta, an Italian architect has already restored a magnificent house with a colonnaded loggia. Just round the corner is a “project” for £33,000: five floors, including an olive press that hasn’t been used since before the war — that’s the Spanish civil war of 1936-39 — in need of total renovation (estimated budget: £35,000- £70,000) to create 200sq m of living space with a roof terrace with views to the river. “A similar ruin in the Girona area would cost at least £140,000,” says Fryer — and for an old farmhouse there you would pay a minimum of £350,000.
If your ideal Catalonian home is not complete without a view of the sea, Tarragona’s Costa Daurada has some promising resorts that have escaped the horrors of what Fryer calls the “sacrificial tourist sites” dedicated to the cheap package trade, such as Salou. L’Hospitalet de l’Infant, L’Ametlla de Mar and L’Ampolla are fishing ports where city-dwellers from Zaragoza, Reus and Tarragona city take their holidays, strolling the well-maintained promenades, lounging on the clean beaches and dining extremely well and cheaply in the unpretentious restaurants. These family-oriented resorts are “not what people expect in Spain any more”, says Fryer — and now they are “on the verge of a property explosion”, though “luckily, building regulations are very strict now” so their essential character will not be ruined.
In L’Ametlla, £100,000 will buy an apartment in a newish block. L’Ampolla — close to the delta — is cheaper than L’Ametlla, and the £70,000 studio with sea view is still a possibility — a price that is almost impossible to match anywhere else on the coast.
Just don’t forget to pack your Catalan phrasebook.
- Immobiliaria Rieres, 00 34 977 440 374, www. realitypropertyspain.com; The Property Finders, 00 34 972 624 557, www.thepropertyfinders.com
On the market
- In Horta de Sant Joan, one hour’s drive from L’Ampolla, two houses, on 24.7 acres of farmland, are for sale, together, for £230,000. Contact The Property Finders, 08708 004 455, www.thepropertyfinders.com
- This four-bed house in Tortosa has a 1.5-acre garden and overlooks the Els Port mountain range. It is for sale for £217,000 with Immobiliara Rieres, 00 34 977 440 374, www.realitypropertyspain.com
- This chalet, in Sant Josep Muntanya, Tortosa, has half an acre of gardens, four bedrooms and a swimming pool. It is £196,000 with Immobiliara Rieres, 00 34 977 440 374, www.realitypropertyspain.com
- At Ginestar, a 40-minute drive from Reus, this property could be converted to a three-bed house. It is for sale for £79,000. Contact The Property Finders, 08708 004 455, www.thepropertyfinders.com
