Between a Rock and a Bar: an Antipodean Couple Retire to Spain

By Colin Pain

In 2007 Colin was closing in on retirement age, having spent more than 40 years working for various universities, government departments, and consulting companies in various places around the world. After some discussion, he and his wife, Josefina, set off to look around Spain, with which Josefina had a family connection. They ended up buying a house in Olvera, Andalucía. They also decided that 2010 would be a good year to retire; that was when Colin reached 65.

 

This book is a collection of letters they sent to friends and family during their time in Spain. The letters deal with the trials and tribulations of renovating their house, settling into Olvera, getting to know the neighbours, coming to terms with Spanish bureaucracy, and generally having fun in their new surroundings. Some letters are about trips they made both within Spain and to other places nearby. There is a prelude that explains how they ended up in their Spanish village, and some final words that Colin hopes don't sound too much like a rant.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Colin Pain
• Release date: Apr 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224504879

Colin Pain

Colin Pain was born in New Zealand and was raised on a sheep farm near Masterton. This explains why he likes mutton. After primary school in a one-teacher school at Ihuraua, taught some of the time by his mum, he was sent to boarding school in Whanganui where he learnt enough to enter the Department of Geography at the University of Auckland in 1963. Graduating in 1968 with an MA in Geography, his first job was at the University of Papua New Guinea. Between 1969 and 1985 he spent upwards of 10 years in PNG, either living there or on research trips. During that period, he also completed a PhD at the Australian National University and spent two years with the New Zealand Soil Bureau. Subsequently, Colin worked at the University of New South Wales, and at the Bureau of Mineral Resources, now Geoscience Australia, in Canberra. He also worked on consulting jobs in Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates. While in Dubai he learnt to drive on the wrong (right) side of the road, a useful lesson that prepared him for retirement in Spain. He moved back to Australia in 2018 and became marooned in Melbourne because of Covid. In most of these endeavours he was accompanied by his wife Josefina, who sadly passed away in December 2023. He occupies himself with editing and writing, and wonders where he found the time to work when he had a job.

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Preface

My wife, Josefina, and I lived in Olvera, a small village in Andalucía, Spain, from May 2012 to September 2018. We returned to Australia to welcome a new grandson. We had every intension of returning to Spain, but Covid happened, and we found ourselves marooned in Melbourne. That’s the way it goes.

During our time in Spain, I wrote a semi-regular letter to family and friends. I have compiled them here with some judicious editing and have added a few things I forgot at the time. I have added a prelude that explains how we ended up in our Spanish village and some final words that I hope don’t sound too much like a rant.

I am not going to single out for special mention any of the people we met in Spain, although many of them appear in the following pages. Everyone in Olvera, both Spaniard and expatriate, made us welcome and gave us all the help we needed. It was all a bit overwhelming at times and I am very grateful to have met them all. I give them all my heartfelt thanks.

None of the things in this book would have happened without Josefina. It was her idea to go to Spain and she made it happen. I miss her every day.

Colin Pain

March 2024

Prelude

In 2007 I was comfortable in my 17th year at Geoscience Australia in Canberra, although my wife, Josefina, had been reminding me with increasing regularity over the previous 17 years that we had intended to spend only a few years in Canberra. But we had the usual excuses, children to put through school, an investment in property, inertia. Also, I thoroughly enjoyed my work. It gave me opportunities to visit and carry out research into the landforms of Australia in many of the more remote parts of the continent. I was lucky I had arranged to get paid for doing my hobby.

Never-the-less, I could see Josefina’s point. We had been in Canberra a long time. Prior to moving there, the longest we had spent in one place was three years. It was time for a move and a change. And the simplest thing to do was retire. Why retire? That was an easy question to answer as I approached 65 after a long career with various universities, public service organisations, and private companies in several different countries. Why Spain? Not such an easy question, but the answer revolved around Why not? and Where else? And Spain is about as far as I could get from where I was born in New Zealand.

Another important consideration was Josefina’s background. She was born in the Philippines. Her mother is from Zamboanga, and her father was born in the Philippines but is from a Spanish family that arrived in the Philippines two generations earlier. Josefina’s surname of Gallegos indicates an origin in Galicia, or at least the north of Spain. Her family, most of whom are now in Sydney, still speak Spanish at home, so she is fluent in Castilian. We saw this as an advantage, although it turned out to be not as great as we thought but more of that later.

Our early thoughts were to look for somewhere to live in Galicia, but we soon decided against that. The weather seemed appalling with rain, snow, wind, cold. From Canberra, on the other side of the world, Andalucía seemed a much better bet. And so it was that in early December 2007 we found ourselves with our two adult sons on a brand-new Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 enroute from Sydney to Singapore, and then onto a much older Swissair plane to Malaga via Zurich.

We Find a House

We arrived in Malaga at about 7:00 am, found our hire car, and drove to Algarrobo, a small village near the coast east of Malaga, where we had a rental house waiting. The plan was to spend a month looking at real estate in Andalucía, something that Josefina had already set up using the internet to contact agents.

Our introduction to Spanish traffic was a bit harrowing, having spent the better part of two days on planes or in airports, and having to learn to drive on the wrong right side of the road. However, after a day or two, Josefina and the boys stopped shouting at me, which I took to mean I was getting better, or they had given up all hope. Either way, I welcomed the lack of advice.

There were a few tunnels on the autovia, each of which had signs at the entrance and exit. Son Matthew claimed that the exit sign meant Have you had a shower today?

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We finally tracked down the agent for the house after missing the turn off the autovia and going several kilometres too far. Algarrobo proved to be a small, white, and typical southern Spanish village, on a steep hill, and with alarmingly narrow streets. The shouting from my passengers reached a crescendo as I attempted to keep up with the agent in her car and scraped the side mirrors on cars and walls. We caught up with the agent, waiting on the side of the street. She directed us into an impossibly small parking space, we unloaded the car and carried our luggage to the house. I then went to find a more permanent parking space towards the bottom of the village. All this turned out to be good training for what became a feature of life in our chosen village.

After a couple of days recovering from the trip, and our first brush with Spanish roads and traffic, we spent a day in Malaga, and another day looking at houses in Algarrobo. But we didn’t want a house on the coast. There were too many golf courses and fish and chip shops, both of which suggested a preponderance of non-Spaniards in the vicinity (this is after all the Costa del Sol). Instead, we wanted somewhere inland, and with this in mind Josefina had arranged to meet with two real estate agents, one in Mollina, and one in Olvera.

John, from Inland Andalucía Real Estate in Mollina, came all the way down to the coast to pick us up. He turned out to be a tall British citizen resident in Spain. He had a people-mover with wing mirrors that could be folded in at the touch of a button, very useful for narrow streets. He took us into the hills behind Malaga and on to Mollina, a distance of 100 km that took about an hour and a quarter. He told us stories, gave us much useful information, showed us various landmarks, and pointed out some of the interesting features on the area, including little old ladies taking their shopping home in supermarket baskets-on-wheels. He clearly enjoyed living in Andalucía, so we were encouraged in our ideas about doing the same.

After some morning coffee he took us to see several houses. These ranged from OK to what could only be called renovators delights. We were beginning to realise that almost all pueblo houses have several floors. We also found out about the former custom of keeping donkeys in houses; one house we visited still had bridles and harnesses in a room on the top floor. I have a collection of photos of the insides of these houses, and none of them inspire much confidence. The only pueblo I remember is Rute, and that mainly because the neighbour of one of the houses we looked at welcomed us with open arms and started making plans with Josefina about what they would do once we settled in. We noticed a lot of tourist buses. It turns out there is a Museo del Chocolate, and a Museo del Anis in the village, thus taking care of two of the major food groups.

We saw some interesting houses, but nothing took our fancy that day. John returned us to Algarroba that evening. We were tired, but we felt we had made a good start. At least we knew what Andalusian pueblos looked like.

The next day we set off in our hire car for Olvera, following emailed instructions from Zoe, the Olvera Properties agent we were to meet in Olvera. The drive is 150 km, first following the route taken by John the previous day, and then heading west. The road crosses mainly rolling hill country until the last 10 km or so where it rises to cross a ridge before descending to the level of Olvera. As we crested the ridge, we could see a pueblo in the distance. It looked like a pile of sugar cubes going up to the top of a hill with a church and castle clearly visible in the morning light with the sun behind us. We simultaneously said, I hope that’s Olvera.

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Our first view of Olvera.

And indeed, it was Olvera, population 8,500. We followed Zoe’s instructions, found somewhere to park, and then walked up to the Olvera Properties office, at the top of Calle Llana, Olvera’s main street. We were met by Brits Zoe and Melanie, and Melanie’s husband. Melanie has an interesting background. She left home at a tender age, and her departure was widely reported in the media. John Lennon saw the reports and composed She’s leaving home. Zoe turned out to be short and bursting with energy.

After a coffee we set off with Zoe to look at houses, first walking up and down Olvera’s steep streets, and then in her car, to see more houses both in Olvera, and in Pruna, a smaller pueblo of 3,000 people about 6 km away. None of them appealed much, and some of them were wrecks.

Towards the end of the day, Zoe said there was a nice little place just a minute away from the office. We had a look at it, and agreed that it had lots of promise, and was in a good location near the top of the village; this would mean anywhere we wanted to go would be downhill, at least until we wanted to go home. We took lots of photos and returned to Algarrobo to talk about it. After a few days of sight-seeing in and around Malaga, and along the coast near Algarrobo, we decided that the little house in Olvera would be good, assuming the price was right, and we could buy it without too much hassle.

We contacted Zoe again and returned to Olvera to get the process started. This involved settling on a price and seeing a lawyer and a gestor. The latter is a person who knows their way around the intricacies of Spanish administrative bureaucracy, as well as knowing with whom to speak to get things done. There is no equivalent in Australia. Zoe also took us to nearby Ronda to get our NIEs. The NIE (Número de Identificación de Extranjero) is the identification number in Spain for everyone, both EU and non-EU, who is not a Spanish citizen. Getting our NIEs was our first brush with Spanish bureaucracy, was relatively simple, and not at all an adequate warning for what was to follow when we set about getting residence visas. The final step was sending the money from Australia to Spain, again a straightforward process.

So now we owned the house at Calle Peñon 6, Olvera. Its location provided the title for this book. It backs on to Peñon Tahona, one of a small number of rocky hills within the pueblo. And just outside the front door, about 4 metres away, is the Bar Jopo, a source of much noise, amusement, advice and help in the coming days.

Interlude

At the beginning of 2008 we were back in Canberra, the proud owners of a house in Olvera, Andalucía. It had all happened quickly, and with such little fuss that we wondered what was going to go wrong. We had of course seen those TV programs where unsuspecting people arrive in Spain to buy and renovate their dream house, only to suffer from red tape and all the other things that seem to happen in Spain. Yet here we were with a house that required only some modifications and could, at a pinch, be occupied straight away.

One of the first things I did was to track down potential colleagues in Spain so I would have someone to talk with about rocks and soils. I found an article on soils in Spain by Dr Antonio Jordan at the University of Seville. I sent him an email telling him about our impending move to Olvera, asking if I could meet with him once we were there. There was silence for a while, and then I received a reply with the news that he had arranged for me to be an Honorary Associate in the MED-Soil Research Group, Departamento de Cristalografía, Mineralogía y Química Agrícola, Facultad de Química, Universidad de Sevilla. I even had my own page on their web site, complete with a photo Antonio had found somewhere on the web.

It all seemed too good to be true, and it was, in the sense that we didn’t make the move to Spain until 2012. But not to do with things going wrong in Spain. We decided that 2010 would be a good year to move, mainly because that was when I turned 65, a good retirement age. But my health sort of got in the way. I won’t go into the gruesome details but suffice to say I ended up having an operation in April 2010, which solved the problem once and for all. Being a good public servant, I used up all my sick leave (which is not paid out on retirement) and did not formally retire until I was healthy.

Meanwhile, something else happened that changed our minds about moving to Olvera immediately. On 11 July 2009 I returned home from a conference in Melbourne. As I walked in the door the phone rang. It was Kellie-Jane, from the Department of Agriculture in Western Australia, whom I had met only a few weeks earlier, wanting to know if I was interested in a two-year position managing a soil survey in the United Arab Emirates. I said I would have to talk with Josefina and would call back in an hour or two. I then asked Josefina, Would you like to spend 2 years in Dubai? I’ve been asked . . . That was as far as I got. She shouted Yes!, and promptly started looking for suitcases and talking about what we would have to take. So, I was able to phone back immediately. As soon as the dates were confirmed we organised packing and storing of our worldly goods, which spent the next 2 years in storage in Canberra.

My last day of work at Geoscience Australia was 4 July 2010 and we flew to Dubai on Saturday 5 July, arriving early on Sunday 6 July. There was a slight hiccough when we arrived for our flight from Canberra to Sydney for our connection to Dubai. Emirates has a 30 kg baggage allowance on their flights, and this should have covered our domestic flight to Sydney. However, in Canberra, because of a late change in our flights, there was no record of the connection. Being Saturday there was no way of contacting the company I was to work for. However, I took advantage of my Qantas Club membership to cause some phone calls to be made, and all was well.

I attended my first project meeting that afternoon (the work week in the UAE is Sunday to Thursday). During the first couple of weeks, while I figured out what my new job entailed, Josefina looked for an apartment that would be our home for the next two years. We finally settled on a serviced apartment on the 19th floor of the Marriot Hotel in the Marina, close to one of Dubai’s famous palm tree suburbs on reclaimed land. We had a fine view of the sea, an airstrip that served the Dubai Sky Diving Club, and a super yacht belonging to the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. One of Josefina’s first purchases was a pair of binoculars. The apartment had everything we needed, including a spare bedroom for guests. And there was a button on the phone labelled AYS. This was an acronym for At Your Service, and one push of the button allowed us to request anything we wanted, from the cleaning service to meals and drinks. Every house should have an AYS button. Josefina wanted to take it with us when we moved to Spain.

My office was in Al Dhaid, a town surrounded by sand dunes in Sharjah Emirate. It was an hour’s drive (about 90 km) from the Marina. Office hours were from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm, although the last two hours were for consultants only; the Emiratis’ day ended around 2:30 pm. The early start meant that I had to leave the Marina at about 6:30 am. My team consisted of a specialist in soil mapping and classification from the USA, six soil surveyors from Pakistan and Bangladesh, a computer specialist and an office manager from the Philippines, and a logistics officer from India. During the two years various short-term specialists came and went. There was lots of fieldwork, carried out mainly by the soil surveyors. They went out early in the morning to avoid the hottest part of the day when it can reach over 50o C. It all went very well, with only a few hiccoughs. On a couple of occasions soil