If it wasn’t for the lockdowns, home working, home schooling and little else to do for light relief other than have one too many in the garden or browse the internet, I wouldn’t have found the tiny tower. One of a small and uninspiring group, in an optimistic search for ‘under €30.000’, it was the first place I’d found in 30+ years of intermittent looking that I could possibly borrow the money for, and wasn’t tucked away in the mountains. It was on the coast. Whoop! I’d love to hole up in the hills, but a home from home would be a family bolt hole, and the boys, now teenagers, were unlikely agree with that. I’d dreamt about this since completing a European Languages degree in the 90s and it might have remained a pipe dream until I clicked on the tower.
One thing I’ve inherited from my father is a ‘just do it’ attitude. Whilst I knew nothing about the location or the condition of the house, it was fairly close to Vigo, where I’d been on a month long reccy with the boys and our dog, Joyce, 5 years previously, and most importantly, it was in Galicia, the region I’d romantically set my heart on living in, for almost 30 years. No real reason, only that it is verdant, has Celtic connections and part of me is Welsh. Messages were exchanged with the estate agent on WhatsApp, and I expressed an interest.
I persuaded my eldest to view the house with me. His father had died earlier that year and I felt a short trip together would do us good. That part hung in the balance, when we were told at the airport we didn’t have the correct Covid documents to fly to Porto in Portugal, from where I’d planned to take the train to Pontevedra. We had to spend the night at Stansted before catching the first plane to Santiago de Compostela the following day. Spain had less restrictive Covid regulations in place. That month, anyway. We had an appointment with the agent that afternoon and although I explained the reasons for our delay, it was Friday and he was finishing work on time, no hanging about. The public transport options, which are generally very good, were a mystery then, so a €120 taxi ride took us to the bar in Estribela where I’d arranged to meet him, a young man possibly still short of his 18th birthday.
We walked to the house, picking up another man en route, José. The rooms, reeking of cat pee, were filthy and dark. Something small had died in the kitchen and the whole grim scene was accompanied by a man, a neighbour maybe, shouting outside in Spanish that the house was ‘illegal’. It was pouring with rain. My son, then only 16 and in no mood for my kind of adventure, wanted to make a sharp exit. The bonus of the rain was that I could just about see in the gloom that there were no obvious leaks. I called my friend and foreign escapade mentor, Sarah, who sagely advised to take as many photos as possible, check for leaks and record on my phone whatever the commotion was outside. The boyish estate agent had helpfully disappeared as soon as we’d arrived, and we grabbed a lift with José to our Air BnB. Son: pissed off, me: deflated but not giving up.
It rained all weekend. My son stayed in bed, annoyed he’d missed a party back at home, so I bought a brolly, went back to the house and strolled around the town. It wasn’t bad. It was better than than that, it was pleasant. Everything you’d expect from a small Galician town; a central square, London plane trees (Platanus x hispancia; more Spanish than English, to be fair), cafes everywhere, people wandering to and fro, and what seemed to be a lot of industry along the coast. The port. I could only peer through the little house windows, but again, what I could see was grubby, grim in places, but not damaged. Derelict yes, but it had a roof. Several other houses I nosed around that day, didn’t.
I returned to two policemen standing outside our rented apartment. A passer-by reported a smoking cigarette butt being lobbed from the overhead balcony, and my son was the only suspect. When they pointed to the butt on the pavement, my limited Spanish pointed out that it was a Spanish cigarette and we’d arrived only the night before. He was 16 and had no access to euros or fags. Despite soaring cortisol levels, I was quietly surprised at their presence. Two policemen to attend a single cigarette butt incident? Wow.
The day we left, the sun appeared, and we walked to the closest beach, along a track lined with pine trees and eucalyptus. The invasive eucalyptus is everywhere; used for the cellulose pulp of the Ence factory in Placeres, at the expense of the native pine, oak and chestnut . More of that later. But the walk was beautiful and we swam in a sheltered cove with its cafe still open in October. I was sold and I put in an offer on the house, via WhatsApp, as soon as we got back to England. I contacted a large architect’s firm in Madrid, found online, and they arranged for a local architect/surveyor to do a condition survey of the house. It was useful, confirmed there were no gaping holes or cracks, and concluded only that it smelt really bad. I was happy with that.
