20 Years living in Spain

Jan standing in what would be our swimming pool 

On 18 March 2006 we arrived in Parcent to start our new life in Spain.   We had both finished work during the previous week, handed over the keys to our house in the UK on 17 March and caught the boat to Santander the same night.

14 months earlier we had selected the house of our choice and put down a deposit.   So many people wanted to buy in Spain in 2006 that there were not enough houses to go around.  So most had to buy “off plan”, which meant that the house was not built yet.   You would put down a deposit and the builder would start building.   At each stage you would pay the costs of work completed until the house was finished and you paid the final amount.   This system was largely responsible for the many properties which were never completed and buyers lost everything when the builder disappeared.  Fortunately that did not happen to us.

The advantage of buying “off plan” is that you had a large say in the design of the property.   As a result I was able to extend the floor plan to include a wargames room with a walled off area to store the figures and scenery.   As you can image a lot of consideration went into this project.

 

First walk with Costa Blanca Mountain Walkers

Our first priorities on arrival were to organise the wargames room and join the Costa Blanca Mountain Walkers, a local walking group.    We had to wait for our removal van to arrive with our furniture and boxes of models and scenery.   But within a week we had joined the walking group and were exploring the many beautiful walks within an hour of our new house.  Walking had always been one of our passions, with Wargaming being the second.

Walking was very popular here long before we arrived.   The CBMW had been formed in 1985 and was well established by the time we arrived.   Most members were British, but with large numbers of Germans and Dutch.   Unfortunately hardly any Spanish, who are not really interested in organised group walking.   They offered three walks each Wednesday and Saturday, and all were free to attend.  It was not unusual to have 50 or more on a particularly popular walk.   So it was not long before we had built up a wide selection of friends.

 

Our new wargames room

By the end of April my wargames room was complete and ready for the first game.   We had a 6x6 foot table built and extensive shelving for our collection of 28mm, 18mm and 6mm figures and scenery.   I had also completed 26 2x2 foot wooden scenic squares to allow me to create a wide range of table top battles.

We tried to recruit local wargamers to form a wargames club, which we had done in the UK for many years.   But there was little support, and eventually we decided to restrict our games to just the two of us.  

For a couple of years we played “one off” games, using the three different scales of figures and scenery to add variety to our games.   At the same time Jan started making scenery in the three scales to cover different areas and to build up our existing collection of commercial buildings.   This project would last a couple of years.

By 2008 I was getting bored with “one off” games.   I refought all of Wellington’s battles in the Peninsula, and then tried to do the same with the campaigns of Napoleon.   Wellington worked well, because I had a lot of maps and information available, and also they were relatively small battles.   Napoleon proved much more difficult, and I soon abandoned that project.  

But it did prompt me to create a fictional campaign based on 1813.   It would allow me to use all of my wargame figures, and all of our scenery.   The campaign took many months to create, and the first battle was fought in August 2009   The campaign has run non- stop since then.   I recorded the campaign on a blog, which gave me another long term interest.   At present we have fought 523 battles as wargames.

I have always been aware that our two main passions are Wargaming and hill walking, but when we moved to Spain I started a blog to keep friends and family in the UK up to date with our life here.    This has led to a third, and equally time consuming, passion – namely blogging.   But that will be the subject of a future post.