Blogpost 62, 24-APR 2026, Reijer Staats
Live for today
Life in Spain and La Alpujarra. A new chapter. Live for today, tomorrow is not promised. I find myself in that familiar phase men go through, the one you feel you are not supposed to have when you think you already do what you want, and especially not when you have already emigrated to Spain.
Between all the cancellations of our casas, Spanish storms and rain, and our travel plans that keep getting postponed, because this is also what living in Spain in Andalusia sometimes looks like, we mostly spend the winter dealing with whatever comes our way. Is this it? I ask myself often. I also start to doubt writing on my blog. Because who is waiting for my stories in a world with so much going on?
But in spring, things start moving again and our life takes a new turn. We are going to start something new again! I really feel like writing about that: “Johan, do you maybe have a good title?”
Photo: Happy trails! La Alpujarra in Andalusia keeps attracting us again and again.
The cheeky couple
Those who have read my blogpost before know how two unknown neighbours once had to rescue me from a windy rooftop terrace of our Ático Lolapaluza when I was installing the jacuzzi, accidentally let the sliding door lock behind me, and could not get back inside. Since then, the standard instruction for our guests is:
“Use this door on the right,” I show them, “because I removed the lock so this one can never close by itself. Look, this one on the left…” — I show it again — “this one will lock.”
On the evening before the long weekend of Día de la Constitución and Día de la Inmaculada Concepción in December, I leave Ático Lolapaluza again and head back home. The guests have checked in: last-minute booking, he is from Sevilla, he still had to pick her up in Granada, so they only knew at the last moment what time they would arrive. When I finally receive an arrival time, they still show up two hours late.
I leave them with clear instructions. At least, that is what you would think, because I can still see her nodding at the sliding door.
At 00:30, an unknown Spanish number wakes me up. Half asleep, I swipe the call away.
Then three messages come in:
“Reijer”
“Estamos en la terraza”
“No podemos entrar”
Sigh. I stop breathing for a few seconds. Unease comes over me.
I reply: “OK, un momentillo, voy ahora”
Only half an hour later I put the key in the front door of the ático to quickly rescue the locked-out guests from the rooftop terrace. But the lock will not move. I grab my phone and call the number from the messages; their guests’ key appears to be on the inside of the door. I hear someone sniffing, maybe crying on the other side, and I, now also starting to panic, hang up to call Johan for advice. No answer. My heart is racing in my chest.
So, into the cold night again and off to the Guardia Civil, where I try to reach several 24-hour locksmiths. The third one finally answers and at around 03:00 in the night I manage to get inside and open the sliding door from the bedroom to the rooftop terrace. I find two shaking and freezing young adults, tangled into each other on the cold terrace floor next to the damp hot tub, with one small towel covering their private parts. The air conditioning inside the bedroom had been running at full power all those hours. Sauna temperatures!
Suddenly I feel like a voyeur in what is, for them, quite an embarrassing situation. I don’t know how fast I should leave this scene. “Buenas noches!”
Photo: Christmas in Cádiz, “La Tacita de Plata”, a city surrounded by water with a silver shine and a strong character. See also the video on Facebook or Instagram.
Is this it? Life in Spain: doubt, reality and starting again
In winter (I know, that is already long gone) we are no longer being run by guests, but by cancellations instead:
“Our health is not so good at the moment,”
“I have found myself again. Spain does not fit right now,”
“Our dog does not handle long car rides well,”
“My parents are not doing well,”
“Given the situation in the world, maybe this is not the right time to come to Spain…”
A change in our cancellation policy on Airbnb to a less strict category leads, next to more bookings, also to more cancellations. Some long winter bookings from guests who planned to come here to slow down fall away and get replaced by short stays, which gives us less flexibility: our own planned trips to discover more of Spain keep getting postponed again and again.
I am angry at Trump, angry at Israel, angry at the manosphere and disappointed in the way some people put all the blame, for whatever, on migrants or other cultures without nuance. “Hey, you cannot judge a whole group based on the behaviour of a few individuals,” I say. A friend tells me that this may sound well meant, but that it is also a bit naive.
I ask a female friend, whom I usually call ‘Hombre’, how she experiences feeling safe on the street. I introduce this question with something from my own experience as a gay person: sometimes I feel uneasy around a macho group. The type of loud, badly behaved guys, not from around here, maybe had too much to drink, always scanning the people around them, looking for something or someone to react to. When I see them, I cross the street.
The Hombre friend responds in detail, with her own examples and tips on how to behave as a man when you walk towards a woman alone in a dark street and you do not want her to feel unsafe. She ends with: “PS: Ask your question also to another woman. I am curious about her answer.”
I do. My introduction is the same, but the reaction from the second woman is different: “But Reijer, people can also see that you are gay.”
Oh, how I love this Spain without labels, that speaks up against the injustice in the world. And the Andalusian people, who are mainly busy with themselves and not so much with others who think differently or look different. Then our barber Jesús tells me how much racism he experiences here, and that as a gitano and a father of four, he often has to explain to his children why they were not invited to a birthday party. I look at him in the mirror, surprised, while he continues:
“They like to hear us sing, they like to see us dance, you will not hear them say a bad word, but we often experience social exclusion.”
His words touch me.
Thoughts go around in my head: yes, I will get a tattoo, a nose ring and wear long Nike socks. I shave my head with a trimmer, just back from the barber. The way I take the milk foam from my cappuccino with a spoon. How I pick my nose. My uncomfortable awareness of how things are supposed to be, and how I judge others because of that. The bits of food left between my teeth. My sense of feeling less than others. The light panic that can suddenly come over me.
I am not only becoming my mother. I also start to miss her, now that I understand her better.
Johan sometimes does not understand me anymore. Me, with my 99% chocolate, my sweet potato dishes and the seed mix in my homemade kefir. I slice courgette into spaghetti and ask if we will eat beans tonight. His answer is always: “Yes, Beatrix.”
One storm after another moves towards Spain.
Is this it?
Will next winter be like this one again?
Suddenly I feel completely back in my body.
Photo: La señora Andaluza in the bus stop around the corner from our house.
A final cancellation
I am looking for words for the sound of a long, narrow, silent hospital corridor. It feels slow and endless, and I am fully in the moment. The sound is threatening and echoing. Footsteps on linoleum, my breathing bouncing of the walls, the smell of clinical sterility.
In front of us walks the night nurse. Her husband has been admitted to hospital.
At the start of their winter stay in Spain, he was already short of breath, and a few days ago, when it really was no longer going well and they didn’t know what to do, I drove to them, called 112, and helped him into the ambulance.
He seemed safe. There was a treatment plan. Things were getting better. But during the night my phone rang, and she told me in panic she had been called to come to the hospital immediately. So I park in the basement. We proceed to Urgencias. The night nurse takes us to the Intensive Care Unit.
The doctor looks worried. I open Google Translate.
A thrombosis had suddenly spread into his lungs.
He is in a coma.
He won´t have long.
“You have ended up in a nightmare,” I say, and we walk to his bed in the Intensive Care Unit, which is just being closed off with mobile room dividers.
I drive home. She stays with him. How you suddenly find yourself in the middle of someone’s life. Of love and death. Conversations nobody wants to have. Family on the way. “Live for today, tomorrow is not promised,” the text above the photo in the kitchen of Casa Larimar suddenly feels so true. Clothes that will soon end up in a clothing container. Someone who will be left behind, alone.
A week later I read in the guestbook: “Lost in paradise.”
Photo: Calma después de la tormenta.
Agua planning
Between one storm and the next, and all the cancellations, these two hombres and their dog take a sunny trip to Murcia, Elche, Alicante and Cartagena (see this video on Facebook or Instagram). And every time, we are also glad to come back home. As if it confirms we made the right choice to live in Almuñécar.
Back home I contact the large hotel in Salobreña, which is responsible for the shared water depot of Villa Merise and the casas of our six vecinos.
In this story I am the president of the small neighbourhood community: the one who arranges maintenance, keeps contact, and handles the administration. I ask for a new bottle of the product our manitas adds to the water every month, and for a planning for major maintenance of the depot. We agree that someone will come by for an inspection.
In front of me stands a small, bald and nervous man: El Jefe. He immediately calls the ferretería, coincidentally the same shop with the 24-hour locksmith service that helped free the “the cheeky couple”. The product will be set aside for me in the shop; when I pick it up I see a grin I did not expect from this lock magician.
After the inspection of the depot we walk to our neighbour, the former mayor of Salobreña, to discuss the planning: Tuesday evening El Jefe will start emptying the depot. Wednesday cleaning. Wednesday evening the depot will be filled again. Thursday everyone should have water again.
So said, so done. I coordinate with the winter guest in Villa Merise and inform all neighbours about the maintenance.
But on Wednesday morning I see no movement at all: the depot is still full of water. I call El Jefe. No workmen, he tells me briefly, maybe this afternoon. But no pasa nada, time passes. I call a few more times. First I still hear some of his stammering, but then a new phase unfolds in our contact: I am simply hung up on. Eventually, there is no more answer to my phone calls at all.
“He doesn’t seem to like foreigners,” I say to the mayor, but he shakes his head. “El jefe no es una persona seria.” We should not have asked him for this job. The mayor helps me find another local service provider and a few weeks later a new date is set. This time everything seems to go according to plan.
But on the day after the cleaning, the phone calls start coming in: there is no water!
El Jefe explains that the water pump broke during the last storm, promises to have it repaired, and says he will send truckloads of water in the meantime, but again all he says remained empty promises. The weekend passes. Then another.
For our winter guest we arrange a hotel and another rental.
Only after nine days water comes back from the tap.
In the meantime I sign a report at the Guardia Civil, the Policía Local comes by to check if there really is no water, a neighbour sends a lawyer after El Jefe, and several politically engaged neighbours drop letters on the town council´s desk. On the social media profile of our main character I mostly see VOX propaganda, family photos at the bullfighting ring, and his wife over-posing in a tight sheer swimsuit at the edge of a pool. A friend tells us locals have heard the hotel in Salobreña has a past on the wrong side of fascist Spain.
Our activist neighbour tells me El Jefe and the mayor once worked together in the PP, until a political dispute got out of hand and they got into a physical fight. After this incident the hotel owner talked him into joining VOX, and as a reward he got responsibility for our water.
VOX, PP, PSOE…
Slowly I start to understand Spanish bureaucracy better.
Emigrating to Spain is also this: realising there is actually nobody here who really takes full responsibility.
Photo: “And Johan! Any news?”
Una Más
The question ‘Is this it?’ comes up again. Johan and I are happy with our portfolio of authentic holiday rentals Villa Merise, Casa Larimar and Casita Helvetia, but it is already almost a year and a half since we added Ático Lolapaluza to it. I remind him of a small budget we keep aside for setbacks, like a broken car or disappointing income… or maybe for one last project after all?
We start exploring the idea:
It does not necessarily have to be an addition to our rental portfolio.
Mainly a place in a different environment where we like to be ourselves.
Something to get our teeth into.
Christmas with friends by the fireplace.
A place where I can find writing inspiration.
Yes, that feels right!
On rainy winter days we are both on our phones: Idealista, Kyero, Fotocasa, Pisos, ThinkSpain, we go through them all. Mostly Johan comes up with suggestions, I follow along, sometimes it goes smoothly, sometimes I do not respond or ignore him, sometimes it creates tension between us and we do not speak for the rest of the day. What stays, ends up on a shortlist.
Our search area is large. We make beautiful trips. Under Dutch skies and along Andalusian roads we wander between coast and mountains through La Alpujarra and already start to feel spring coming. We explore the Tropical Valley behind Almuñécar and discover Alhama de Granada inland.
We walk past vineyards, almond trees and cortijos where mules still work the land. We meet proud, friendly Spaniards.
Sometimes friends join us on our trips and walks, the Hombre friend, for example. On a terrace in the sun we let the afternoon drift away.
Back in the car Johan and I look at each other for a moment, a quick look, because we managed to keep our plans to ourselves. And despite all the photo and video updates on my Facebook and Instagram profile, no one asks any questions.
What fits the budget is often unfinished or too remote. It feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. A house that almost works is in the wrong village. A ruin in the town of Órgiva turns out better than expected, but has a scruffy and suspicious cat lady as neighbour. We make an offer on an authentic historic property in Alpujarra style with a slate floor and Moorish chimney, but the plaster starts falling off the walls after the rain, and we decide to withdraw our offer when even our lawyer starts having doubts.
And then we drive on again, past a cortijo for sale, basically just to cross the small farmhouse off our shortlist.
And Johan! Any news?
What? Una Más?
Hidden in the Contraviesa mountains of La Alpujarra, at 1,000 metres above sea level, we come across a small cortijo with its own orchard. Close to the wine village of Albondón and only 25 minutes by car from the beach. See my video of this area on Facebook or Instagram.
Photo: We immediately fell for the peace and simplicity, the almond groves and the sea view.
We have signed the preliminary purchase contract. Now it is a matter of waiting for the paperwork. After that, we will get to work, so we can share this special place with guests next winter.
While I continue writing, Johan has already started cutting the first letters out of a piece of scrap wood for the new name sign: Una Más.
I walk over to him. “Is this it?”
He does not look up, just glances to the side. “Yes,” he says, and continues cutting.
Live for today. Tomorrow is not promised.
This is life in Spain, exactly as it is. Want to read more about our life in Spain? Have a look at our other Spanish chit-chats.
Until next time!
Johan & Reijer