Good question!
On the positive side of things, we have the contract for the sale of here which we’ll sign when we see the buyers next Tuesday.
We have the documentation from the Notary about the correction of the details on the land registry, so that’s happening.
We’re assuming we will be moving before the end of this month, so we’ve started packing. The photo above is my workshop. I’ve actually started packing at this point but it looks worse than ever, I think because I’ve been building piles of like-things to make it easier at the other end. It doesn’t look quite so bad now as most things are in boxes!
We had a moving company come round today to quote for the move. His quote came as quite a shock (not in a good way), but we keep forgetting how far it is. While we expected a high quote when we thought we were moving to La Palma, we thought it would be less to Galicia. But of course, La Palma, although it’s further away and a longer trip time-wise. In actual kms driven, it’s a lot shorter as it was just to the ferry port in Cadiz.
And we’ve got a quote for moving the animals, but we’re not too sure whether we will do this or hire a van and do it ourselves.
On the not-quite-so-good side of things, something we weren’t aware of because when we bought this house we were Europeans, is that ‘foreigners’ from outside of Europe can’t buy property with any land designated as ‘rural’ in some parts of Spain without permission from the Ministry of Defence. The areas that are covered are all coastal areas and ‘strategically important’ areas. Which is basically all of Galicia.
This came completely out of the blue and while is described as a formality, it takes time to do and we would have to apply to buy a particular house, we can’t just get a permit which would allow us to buy anywhere.
The good news (hopefully) is that we believe the property we are looking at is 100% on urban land, which means we wouldn’t need to do anything. However, if even a tiny area was designated ‘rural’ we’d have to go through this process.
So things have slowed up a bit because although we can see that the property is on urban land on the Catastro, it also needs to say the same thing on the Property Register, so this is being checked and confirmed for us at the registry office and we’ll know tomorrow.
If part of the land is rural, we can apply to the MOD and while this is supposed to be a formality it can take between 6 & 8 weeks, so we’d have to think how to proceed.
What a lesson learned! We came here as Europeans and are now designated as third nation ‘foreigners’, albeit with residential status.
I was initially quite surprised I hadn’t heard more about this from disgruntled ‘Brits’ – however then I thought that most of the popular areas for people to buy are in the coastal resorts, so they will all be urban land. And for anyone who needs a mortgage etc, the delay doesn’t really make any difference. It’s only important to us because of the time delay making things difficult.
Ian has spoken to an estate agent he saw last week about rental property, and told her about our situation, along with our pet quota and she has spoken to someone who will rent a property to us, so we do have a fall back situation, however this wouldn’t be our first choice.
The annoying thing is while it’s only taken a week – given our super-short time frame, it’s quite a big chunk if we need to make an offer on a second house.
We do have a healthy short list of properties, the only question being whether any of these have any rural land attached to them.
In other news, we still have Wilbur with us. When Ian was away I put an old rug down for Wilbur being more comfortable to lie on – and to help him get up without his paws sliding around. He did lie on it for the photo – but chose to ignore it after that! Thinking about it, it might have been because the rug was by the back door so a bit of a busy thoroughfare.
A couple of weeks ago, we were very much expecting each day to be Wilbur’s last with us. I don’t know how much this has helped him, however I doubled the glaucosime I give him and he has it twice a day. Since then, I don’t think he has fallen as much, and he does get up at meal times sometimes unprompted, and I think he looks stronger on his back legs. He’s clearly very frail and he’s nearly 13 which is a pretty good age for a big dog.
I am very much an advocate for glucosamine – we’ve seen it have such positive effects now on different animals, I am sure it can’t be a coincidence. It has given Wilbur a little boost in his quality of life, but Ian and I were saying that we’ll probably say good bye to Wilbur next week. I think the time will be right.