The 78-year-old retired consultant first started holidaying in Mijas Costa, a small town that sits between Marbella and Malaga, in 1988. He moved to Spain permanently after retiring in 2006 to enjoy a slower pace of life with “less congestion, noise, and pollution” than he had in London.
Peter Moreve doesn’t particularly like living ‘among Brits’
Mijas Costa sits along Spain’s Mediterranean coast in a province with just 92,000 residents. Data released last year from Spain’s National Institute of Statistics showed Mijas is growing and is now the third most populous area behind Marbella and Malaga. Around 40 per cent of its residents are foreign, the majority of whom are British.
But that hasn’t abated his love of Spanish culture. “I like Spaniards because at first sight they accept you for what you are. Then they talk about you behind your back, as Britons would,” he joked.
Beachgoers enjoy the sun and the sea at Malagueta beach in Malaga (Photo: AFP/Getty)
Yearning to live life among Spaniards, he left the Costa del Sol in 2018 and moved to Lucena, a town of about 45,000 people near Cordoba in Andalusia, which has only a handful of foreigners.
In 2018 British people were more commonly buying properties in Asturias, in northern Spain, and La Rioja, the wine region in the northwest of the country, according to the Spanish Land Registry. In La Rioja, 25 per cent of purchases that year were by British people.
Now research by the Spanish Tourist Board shows that people from the UK are increasingly branching out from holidays on the Mediterranean coast or big cities like Barcelona or Madrid to explore the interior of the country once again.
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Patrick Millar, from city break specialist Kirker Holidays, said the company has seen a particular surge in demand for cultural cities and smaller destinations outside of the well-trodden tourist trails in Spain.
In 2002, they moved from Somerset to Villena, a small city of about 36,000 people about 30 minutes drive inland from Alicante and a world away from the resorts of the Costa Blanca, where they raised their two young children.
“And we wanted the real Spain,” the accountant said. “We wanted to experience a foreign country rather than moving from England to England with the sun.”
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