Moving to Alicante - The long personal story of buying an apartment in Costa Blanca, Spain

Since moving to Alicante in 2022, I’ve been asked so many times why exactly this Mediterranean corner of the world.

My initial reaction is, why not?

Here’s sun, city, beach and everything, yet let’s dive into the whole story how I ended up in here.

To be honest, this all started very randomly and to get all the details in, I’ll start with a background story.

When I first time visited Valencia in 2018, I fell in love with the city and said I’d love to live there one day. Life went on, I moved from Malta back to my home country Finland.

And fast forward to year 2021, when I wanted to relocate to South East Asia.

Our beloved pandemics made it quite challenging with closed borders/more strict policies, so we decided to stay within EU with my boyfriend.

As we’ve always loved Spain (and both of us have lived before in Canary Islands) we decided in September 2021 (right after getting our vaccine passports) to drive from Finland to Spain.

Btw, here's my answer to WHY SPAIN - How did I end up living in Spain

We arrived in Valencia first weekend of November as we took the roadtrip slowly from Finland, enjoying the countries on the way and working remotely.

In Valencia life did not start as ideally as I had imagined.

In Valencia life did not start as ideally as I had imagined.

We had dragged our mountain bikes all across Europe, and never had any issues in any destination during the 2 months.

Yet in Valencia, we disattached them from the car and locked around a pole below our Valencian apartment during the time of getting the keys and being shown the place.

Well, it took 15 minutes in Valencia to get the bikes stolen.

Actually, I am looking directly into this bike-stealing junkie from our balcony and shouting like a maniac that it’s my bike and leave it.

He rushed, managed to cut one bike and cycle away. (My boyfriend did manage to get it back though with awesome detective work and the help of too many Spanish police after a while :D (I could write an own story of that, as well as some other robbery stories that ended up kinda lucky).

After the initial shock, life did not get that awesome just yet.

After all the sitting in car at the roadtrip and working full-time with sedentary job during days, combined with some heavy gym sessions my already in Finland issues having sciatic nerve decided that this is the time to immobilize me totally in bed.

I had enormous nerve pains, I did not get any help from public health, although I had European Health Insurance Card, but the queues for getting an MRI scan were too long.

I was so scared I would never walk again, the pain was making me almost pass out and I felt so alone in a new country where I knew nobody else besides my boyfriend.

And there was no way to fly to Finland to see a doctor, as I could not sit or walk at all.

I ended up going to private osteopath and really slowly the pain reduced and I relearned to walk.

10 steps a day became 100 and at some point 1000.

Obviously I was very lonely, I could not get to know anybody like that, and I had to work as well, so I was basically working on bed laying down on my belly, having laptop on the ground.

(If I had to find some silver lining, that made me educate myself to become a professional healer for sciatica, teaching it in a 4 weeks course for others in similar desperate situation - in this 4 weeks sciatica relief online course).

Due to all of these sad events, I did not feel the best in Valencia.

Let’s finally get into the Alicante part!

Our rental contract in Valencia was coming to an end after 9 months in Valencia and we had no interest in lengthening it or staying in Valencia.

We had actually very little plans after leaving Finland, as we had just packed everything we can fit to Ford Focus from 2007 (it’s surprising spacious btw!) and made a 6 month rental contract in Valencia.

We started looking for the option of buying an apartment in spring 2022, as we realized it would be so much better, as rental prices in Valencia, and other towns in Costa Blanca in general were skyrocketing.

We did not have clearly a place in mind, we just knew we’d prefer a bit smaller place, but not any “pensioner village”.

Then I was calling with mom, who had been watching some real estate reality TV in Finland of buying an apartment in Spain.

She said there are many cheap apartments in Torrevieja, and this initially gave me an ick, as Torrevieja back then in my ears sounded like a Finnish pensioner village which is cheap for a reason (read: ugly, weird and disconnected).

I thought of being anyhow open-minded, and we browsed some places from Idealista, and decided to go for a weekend to see some flats in there.

We had already scheduled showings for the upcoming weekend; but then our car broke.

We were looking into public transportation options from Valencia to Torrevieja, yet it seemed like a hassle.

We would have needed to take a train to Alicante and continue by bus/other means from there.

That made us decide on ditching the whole Torrevieja idea, cancel the showings, and seriously browsing idealista all evenings, but this time apartments from Alicante.

We decided to go on that “Torrevieja Apartment Showings” weekend by train to Alicante and we managed to schedule three showings in Alicante.

We arrived in Alicante early Friday morning and went to work from a café, as it was still a regular 9-5 day for us as full-time remote workers.

The city seemed nicely walkable and in the afternoon we walked towards our first showing.

It started raining a little bit and the road up towards our place looked dodgy and weird.

The area we walked through was mainly lived by Southern Americans and Africans and there was a lot of shouting and all kind of stuff going on on the streets.

I was not convinced at all. I even suggested shall we just cancel the showing as this area doesn’t seem good at all.

Yet Matt was like, might as well see it as we made it all the way here, and at least to have comparison material compared to other flats.

We walked further to the actual street where the apartment was, and that was actually better – quite typical Spanish road and silent (or like, Spanish silent, not Finnish silent :D).

Our agent came and walked us to the second floor and opened the door.

This has been one of the most clarity feelings I’ve had what happened next:

It’s like all the other weird energy from my head and outdoors turned off, and I felt calm and like home.

We instantly looked each other into eye with Matt and without saying a word, we both knew this is our home.

I was still rationally resisting this though, as I was still hesitant of the nearby area, though it was a little walk away.

The apartment was located in typical Spanish work-class area in quite good location: 800 metres to Mercado, 1km to Beach, nearby a Castle up a hill and great connection by bus to Airport and around city.

But the best part (besides the energetic feeling) was that the apartment was renovated and furnished.

Ideal, as we would need to move in ASAP and we knew nothing about renovating, and even less about hiring people in Spain to do it for us.

I hope you’re not fed up with reading yet, as this is not the end yet of buying the flat and living happily ever after.

The agent was good, as he actually pointed out things we were looking for in Alicante, and he spoke English.

Yet, we both had a little bit weird feeling on him, that we could not really say why.

Just a little red flag of energy. But we just ignored it as he was really nice and helpful as well, and about our age.

We went to see few more places in Alicante, some terrible, some nice but out of our budget.

It was time to go back to Valencia and get some serious negotiations going.

We made an offer for the place with a few extra requests, like fixing something small in the second shower etc.

The real estate agent said yeah yeah, everything was fine for the seller. So we decided to make an offer.

Once we made an offer, we didn’t hear a thing anymore from the real estate agent.

We tried to call and message, but after a few days the number wasn’t in use anymore.

It seemed really odd, and started to seem really suspicious, as we found zero online presence of that real estate agent.

So, we decided to go back to idealista and see if the flat is listed by some other agent as well (in Spain it’s common not to have just one agency showing a certain flat) and we found it listed by 3 other agents as well.

We contacted the most reliable looking Spanish one and told our interest and experience with the other agent.

Apparently they had never heard of an agent named as him, and after they had called the owners of the flat, turns out he had never been in touch with them about our requests and offer.

Ugh, that felt uncomfortable.

Yet, we decided to move on with the flat then with this actual, verified and existing real estate agency.

They were really helpful and helped us on the mortgage process as well.

In the meanwhile, the owner had changed the lock to the apartment so the “agent” they collaborated before could not enter the flat anymore.

We had to wait for about a month to get an appointment with the notary, because the owners of the flat weren’t currently in Spain.

So we had to ask our landlord in Valencia to lengthen our contract for a few weeks, that luckily eventually worked out.

Otherwise we would have needed to rent some random storage space for our stuff and move to a hotel for a while, which wasn’t ideal as pretty much all our money had to go for this flat. :D

So we finally had the notary in Alicante last week of June 2022, and we had to move out from the Valencian flat by the end of June.

We decided to do all of the apartment buying in Spanish and not to hire any lawyers etc. English speaking consultants, which I heard are recommended.

Our Spanish was more or less good enough to do it without English speaking third parties (and wallet not big enough to put 5k€ just to have someone say yes, this is fine).

So went with the gut feeling on this one as well, as this real estate agency seemed reliable and they had great reviews in Spanish.

Our notary day was super exciting and nerving, but also entertaining, because we had to fill a multiple choice questionnaire with questions like:

Are you aware that you need to pay the mortgage back, and the money is not just a gift from the bank?

Yes

No

It was a full-on 20-page questionnaire like this we were left to fill in by the two of us on our own at empty notary office meeting room.

A few hours later, we had all papers signed, all money transferred and keys at hand.

It felt unreal. It was time to get our Ford Focus packed full of our stuff from hotel parking and drive to our home!

We unpacked the car and the time in Valencia had already accustomed us to Spanish parking routines.

We had parked in a “not exactly a real parking spot” as there was no space nearby home, so when we went second time to the car to get more stuff upstairs, there was already a towing car about to get our earthy materia with him in beloved Ford.

Luckily we managed to talk ourselves out of this and could continue the moving day.

As it was getting late, we decided to stay a night in Alicante and drive after work tomorrow back to Valencia to get the rest of the stuff, do final cleaning of the Valencian rental flat and to return the keys.

Yup, working full-time during the process did not exactly make it easier, and many of our paid vacation days of 2022 was basically used for apartment showings, notary day and bank visits.

It was well worth it though, and by 1.7. we could call our current apartment in Spain home.