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The pitfalls of buying a finca in Spain

My partner and I have finally got to the stage of moving to our little finca in th countryside of Costa del Sol, half an hour inland from Malaga. We are owning the finca with three acres of olive trees for nearly four years now. It has been difficult to sell our two houses in UK and actually getting our furniture down to our finca. There is finally a light at the end of the tunnel and we are now making one of our last furniture moving trips. It has been difficult to make renovations when only visiting for short spells, making coming back to the UK harder and harder each time. We have finally made two rooms and an ensuite bathroom comfortable enough for us to think of the place as our home at last. It has been a long struggle with so many stories about the pitfalls of buying through an agent who provided us with a Spanish lawyer, thus needing the agents to provide a translater all the time as we don't speak any Spanish yet. The lawyer turns out now to also be the family solicitor of the huge family that we have bought our finca off. He is now refusing to deal with us after such a long time. He now says it would be a conflict of interest as he works for the Spanish family that we are having boundary problems with. The ongoing battle we have had with this local Spanish family. We have learnt so many valuable lessons whilst trying to buy our finca and it is true that you must never use the same solicitor as the people you are buying from. Always get a solicitor who speaks English. Always make sure you get a proper officially stamped copy from the local town hall showing your boundaries and the sizes of these boundaries and the size of your plot. If possible get fences up as soon as you can define these boundaries. Our last trip left us amazed and frightened. The Spanish family has built an illegal house behind us on one of the remaining family plots. To gain access to this new building they have simply put a road on the edge of our land. Being friendly people we let this go, with the result that the road has got wider and wider. We came back to our finca to find that boundary posts have been moved and deep holes dug into our land to facilitate huge gate posts and a fence also on our land. When we challenged this by filling in the holes and place huge bolders on the original line of our boundary our new neighbours (part of the same family) came out screaming and shouting at us and the husband threatened to shoot my partner. And so it goes on and on. I hope this little snippet of our experiences may be of interest to others planning to make this move. We are trying to look on the bright side and hope that our problems with our boundaries and our Spanish neighbours will be resolved amicably. We are very much looking forward to retiring to the warmer climate and our peaceful little place in Spain.

Sent by: Marie

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