Housing - An Immediate Priority

One of the biggest challenges in relocating to Spain was arranging a place to live without actually being in the country. Our initial goal was simple. Find an apartment or house near Alhaurin el Grande that accepted pets and that we could lease for six months. We wanted a lease that would commence on May 1, but accepted the fact that we might have to pay for April even though we wouldn’t be in Spain. That would give us time to find a long-term home once we were here.

We monitored several websites every day. Among others:
 
Kyero.com
Idealista.com
Propertyalhaurin.com
Thinkspain.com
 
We left messages and contacted agents only to find that the listing had already leased, or they didn’t accept pets, or they wouldn’t do a short-term lease. The six-hour time difference worked against us, as well. Twice we were told by an agent that the apartment was ours, only to find out that it was leased to someone else before we send a deposit. We also considered a long-term Airbnb if all else failed.

Then, we started getting lucky. A friend in Alhaurin put us in contact with a property manager in Mijas Pueblo (I’ll call him Carlos). We checked the map. Mijas Pueblo was only twelve kilometers from Alhaurin, a seemingly reasonable drive while we searched for a place in our desired area. Carlos came through right away. He found us a nice, 3 bedroom apartment overlooking the main square in the town, fully furnished, six-month lease, dogs OK.

Mijas Pueblo turned out to be a spectacularly beautiful place, but not without a few problems.
 

1. The apartment was on the fourth floor (which is really the fifth floor because the ground floor is called zero in Spain), with no elevator. Not an easy situation with two small dogs that need to go out several times a day.
2. Mijas Pueblo is one of the classic “white villages of Andalucía”, and because of its proximity to a large cruise ship port in Malaga, busloads of tourists get dumped into square all day long.
3. Parking was difficult to find. We could see at least 20 restaurants and bars from our balcony.
4. The seemingly reasonable drive from the apartment to Alhaurin proved to be anything but easy. Celia, who is afraid of heights, dubbed it the “road-of-death”. The A-387 winds precariously along steep ledges overlooking massive drop-offs hundreds of feet down. It was narrow enough that I felt a twinge of anxiety every time we met a vehicle coming in the opposite direction, and there were many of those. After traversing the road-of-death four or five times, we settled on a different route that took us forty kilometers out of the way.

 
We resigned ourselves to making the best of the situation while we focused more intently on finding a place in Alhaurin before our lease was up. Then, another magnificent stroke of luck came our way.

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Some images from Mijas Pueblo.