Villena is about 30 minutes’ drive inland from Alicante (Image: Getty Images)
Huge numbers of British people have bought property in , either as a retirement home or simply for the occasional holiday.
Most Brits tend to opt for a spot in somewhere like Marbella or , where expats make up around 5% of the population. But Sue and Andy Whaites from Somerset have instead found themselves a place to live in “the real Spain”.
Sue, 61, explains that they weren’t interested in relocating to an area littered with “English pubs” and shops offering a taste of home. Instead, they’ve rediscovered a quality that they say the UK has lost.
Sue and husband Andy bought themselves a 500-year-old house in Villena, a small city of about 36,000 people just under 40 miles inland from Benidorm.
Andy and Sue weren’t interested in moving to Benidorm’s expat paradise (Image: Getty)
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The house, which sits on two acres of land, cost them just €93,000 (£78,252) in 2002.
What that money bought them, though, was not just a country retreat but a sense of community that they say can’t be found in the UK any more. She told : “The sense of community, is very strong which I think has been lost in England. And family values.”
They say they’ve found a sense of community in the ‘real Spain’ (Image: Getty Images)
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“We wanted to move here in 2002,” Sue added. “We wanted real Spain to experience a foreign country rather than moving from England to England with the sun.”
Andy, 63, added: “We were looking for property with space. You can’t get that on the coast. But also we wanted our children to experience Spain.”
He said that, while there are probably around a couple of hundred Brits in Villena, they weren’t interested in just living in a warmer version of Somerset, but a genuine Spanish lifestyle.
Villena offers a much quieter, more grounded lifestyle than towns on the Costas (Image: Getty Images)
Sue says that the real benefit of moving to Villena is rediscovering a more traditional lifestyle. She continued: ”The fact that everybody knows everybody and says hello to you and if they don’t they still make the effort to know you.
“And it sounds silly but the cooking is like what we ate when we were children, stews and things like that.”
She goes on to add that, while they’ve embraced a more traditional, diets and lifestyle there have been one or two concessions to the country they left – including introducing their new Spanish friends to curries.