Three hours’ drive from the beaches of Barcelona and about the same distance from the museums and nightlife of Madrid, this provincial city has none of the glitz of Spain’s biggest cities.
House purchases by Britons grew last year in previously unfashionable parts of northern Spain like Cantabria, Galicia and Asturias, according to figures from the Spanish Property Registrars. The numbers may be small – between 0.1 and 0.3 per cent of all purchases by all Britons, who are the biggest foreign buyers of property in Spain.
Vineyards around Zaragoza. The couple wanted to avoid popular ‘expat bubbles’ (Photo: Sharon Wade)Sharon Wade and her husband, Norrell Robertson, are two of those expats turning away from traditional British hotspots.
“The removal guys could not believe how far off the beaten track we lived. They were used to taking people from the UK to the Costas,” Ms Wade, 55, who runs a wine business called El Escocés Volante (The Flying Scotsman) with her husband, told The i Paper.
Zaragoza’s Cathedral of Our Lady Pilar (Photo: margouillatphotos/ Getty Images/ iStockphoto)Her husband was offered a job with a wine company and chose to live in Calatayud, which was central to his business.
Puente de Piedra, Zaragoza (Photo: Joe Daniel Price/ Getty Images)
“I also did not want to be living in an [expat] bubble.”
Ms Wade has integrated into Spanish society, partly by getting involved in the dyslexia association to support one of her two sons.
square SPAIN I’m a British expat who loves living in Spain but I’m moving because of tourists
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For art lovers, there is the biggest collection outside Madrid of paintings of Spanish master Francisco de Goya, who was born near Zaragoza.
Other Britons who have lived in Zaragoza for decades also say they have no regrets over making the move to a smaller Spanish city.
Graham Rhodes and Sarah Lothian from Britain both run language schools in Zaragoza
“I caught the first bus out which was to Zaragoza. I ended up here with not much Spanish. Within three weeks, I had a job and a circle of friends. It was 1993. That would not happen if you went back to the UK,” she says.
Graham Rhodes, 63, from Darlington, Northumberland, who also runs a language school, arrived in Spain in 1982. He stayed because he started his own business and did not want to live in a place dominated by British bars like many expat resorts on the Costas.
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