Buying a house in the Alpujarras

Table of contents for Buying a house in Spain

Buying a house in the Alpujarras
Useful internet links When searching for Alpujarran property

Image via Wikipedia

This is our third time in Andalusia. The first time we rented a place in Albunuelas for two weeks. Lovely place, we never wanted to go home again. So the next year we decided to stay for three months, see if we still liked it. We rented a lovely house in Valor and an extremely comfortable one in Alora. Again, we really did not want to go home.

I think it’s a good way to get to know the area, spending weeks on end there, especially off season (we were last here in februari-april), see if you like it when it rains sometimes, when there’s not many other people around, when it’s cold. We did and so here we are, ready to go out and look for a house to buy in the Alpujarras.

Horror Stories
Buying a house in Spain has it’s difficulties. I’m not fluent enough in Spanish to handle the negotiations myself, the laws of the land are very different and I’ve heard a lot of horror stories. Trusting people who used their life savings to buy a nice piece of land with a small house only to find that the house wasn’t on the escritura (the legal documents) so they’d only bought the useless bit of land. Or people who bought a house that had been illegally built inside a riverbed so they had to tear it down. Or a house that was not a house, but an agricultural building, and they weren’t allowed to live there. So finding someone to help you with all the legal stuff can be a really good idea. Luckily, we are not the first foreigners to buy a house in Spain, so there’s a lot of stuff on the web catering to our needs. A British real estate agent also helps.

So next week we are going to view some houses with a British lady and we’ll see what happens. We’ll be looking at properties near Orgiva, Berchules, Valor, Yegen and Pitres.

Next in series

Moving To Andalusia