Although I had visited different parts of Spain during my childhood, my husband Dave had never been there until the year after my parents made the move in 1991.  They had bought a plot of land a few years earlier outside the northern Costa Blanca town of Moraira and had built a villa there.  The old part of town is typically Spanish and quite attractive.  Dave slowly fell in love with Spain, its culture and the sunshine.  However I found the twisting roads and hills around the area where my parents lived quite difficult, as I am very prone to travel sickness, so living there was not an option.

When it came to buying our own property we needed a much flatter part of the coast with no high rise buildings, and that was a challenge!  In addition to that we wanted to be within easy driving distance of my parents’ when visiting.

We had heard from my parents’ friends that the ‘south’ (meaning the part of Costa Blanca south of Alicante) was a terrible place, just a concrete jungle with endless building.  We headed there anyway because it was flattish.  We found that whilst there was a lot of new build property on smaller plots than in ‘the north’, they were affordable.  There was also a lot of protected coastline with pine woods where you could walk along sandy beaches without a building in sight.  Roads heading just a few kilometres inland were lined with citrus groves and palms and for me it was such a change to look at a vista not dotted with white villas.  So this was where we decided to find our new home.

Dave and Bev Townsend have two homes, their main one in Norwich and a second home in Playa Flamenca in south Costa Blanca, which they let as a holiday rental. They also run a property finding business offering a free service for those seeking to buy a property in the Costa Blanca (Alicante) or the Mar Menor area of the Costa Calida (Murcia) www.SpanishDreamProperty.com.   Bev has family in Spain and they intend to move there full-time in a couple of years.