Two very contrasting stories about Almería house sales appear today in the British vs Spanish press.
The Telegraph runs a piece on “End to Mediterranean dream for 90,000 Britons who left Spain last year – British expatriates are deserting Spain in droves, according to new figures from Spain’s national statistics institute “, together with some interesting interviews from ex-expats from Arboleas, and a bit from Maura Hillen of AUAN.
It’s prompted by the news that Spain lost almost 600,000 residents in 2013, mainly due to the return of immigrants to their home countries. Some 90,000 Brits returned to Blighty last year.
Turn to La Voz de Almería which has an interesting piece on how the Brits are flooding into Almería, and how this will be the best year for ages as regards home sales.
Los extranjeros vuelven otra vez a comprar casas en la provincia – Las cifras, en este caso, son más contundentes que las sensaciones shouts La Voz (The foreigners return again to buy homes in the province – the data, in this case, speak louder than feelings).
La Voz claims that TINSA, the property sale auditor, says 2013 provincial sales to guiris have gone up 38.7% over last year, although dropped a massive 73% since 2006.
Let’s not get carried away: only 6.887 homes were sold in the province in 2013, of which 1.318 where to guiris. 200 of these were destined to be used as “second homes” and the rest as principle residencies.
Which do we believe?
Both could technically be true. As Almeria itself is only a very small part of the overall guiri market, an extra few hundred here wouldn’t make a dent on an overall decline. That said it seems the Spanish authorities have very little idea how many foreign *people* have left, as opposed to house sales – I’ve heard figures everywhere from 30,000 up to 600,000. Given so many sin papeles in the country overall, I don’t think anyone can possibly know.
The Spanish are stuck between the fiction that they know and track all, and the truth, which is that the system has so many holes in it that the numbers are just made up as they go along so the authorities hit their own artificial deadlines!
Google now reports 23 news articles (in English) about Brits fleeing Spain, led by The Telegraph twice extrapolating the experience of the Brit couple who left Mojacar for Dubai (?) into an exodus. Hard not to see this coverage as a product of the present UK government’s ‘keep foreigners out/keep Brits in Britain’ media propaganda campaign that has been supported by recent UK benefits/taxation changes. And as a knee-jerk reaction to The Telegraph feature last month that named Costa Almeria one of the best places in the world to live ‘the good life’.
https://news.google.com/news?ncl=dSluj-ACW5loP7MtLZTp9gIOrYFLM&q=spain&lr=English&hl=en&sa=X&ei=N-FcU7D_H-SU7QbimIDABA&ved=0CEcQqgIwBg
It is however, supported by the Spanish national stats office which says the British population in Spain dropped by about 100 k. Although a lot of those nasty have deregulated for tax purposes….
‘Costa del Armageddon’ says today’s Daily Mail headline about the Vera coastline (with a helpful map marked with radioactive symbols), citing a 1960s out-of-print book about the 1966 Palomares nuclear incident. Why would this article appear randomly now, without somebody somewhere having been set the task to find Spanish dirt to dig to put off potential Brit migrants? Why else the sub-header ‘hundreds of British expats … caught in the deadly nuclear fall-out zone’? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2625023/The-Costa-del-Armageddon-How-US-dropped-H-bombs-beach-Spain-turned-hundreds-British-expats-caught-deadly-nuclear-fall-zone.html (The accompanying photo of Palomares is not of Palomares!)
Hardly a new story is it! It happened in 66!
“NHS Rejects Expats Returning From Spain” in The Telegraph is the UK government’s latest hysterical story intended to scare Brits from moving to Spain. “Tough new rules mean that many British expats in Spain will no longer be able to access local health care services,” it says. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/expat-money/10834116/NHS-rejects-expats-returning-from-Spain.html