SYNOPSIS                      SPAIN – BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
                                          A cautionary tale about moving to Spain

This is a true story involving endless dramas, very serious events and a lot of humour and is about our purchase of a property in a remote mountain village in Andalucia, Spain in 1983.  We owned the house for 20 years and lived there for 8 years.

I bought the house within 5 days of seeing an advert in a magazine.  18 months after purchasing the property, the next door neighbours smashed in the entire roof in order to provide work for themselves, the whole roof was on the floor – beams, tiles, the lot - and it took 4 people 2 hours to even open the front door.  At the time, they told us it had been caused by a storm but we found the truth out many years later.

After rebuilding it for 6 years to a beautiful 6 bedroomed house, my husband and I moved there as a family in 1989 with two daughters, a horse and a boxer dog, leaving our son behind.  After 6 months, our marriage of 26 years collapsed and my husband returned to England. Heartbroken and on my own with two children, the mayor of the village began his campaign to steal our land, with plans to build another house in our garden even though we had legal documents.

After 3 years of fighting him, an unexpected ally arrived on the scene, a Spanish boyfriend who had a bookshop selling legal books to lawyers.  He and I embarked on a massive onslaught against the mayor and the town hall and uncovered masses of corruption. We published a magazine informing everybody what was going on, took the mayor to court several times and ended up in all the major newspapers in Spain.   This involved us receiving death threats and regularly being spat on.  Seven of our cats were poisoned.

A particularly unpleasant event involved the mayor arriving at our property with 4 policemen, a huge digger and with about 50 people following him. They proceeded to destroy the boundary fencing we had built, knocking down walls in the process.  It was like a scene out of the middle ages, with the crowd jeering and we captured it all on video camera and submitted it to the courts.  The shock of it gave me a severe asthma attack and I ended up in hospital.

I had great excitement with my work as a healer. I went out on television as part of a film about our village where I was interviewed, along with a few others.  A few days later when this film went out, I had queues of people in the street waiting for healing and this went on for months.  They were mostly people from mountain villages, all with different accents and an extraordinary variety of illnesses.  I eventually had several clinics for healing, rented rooms in the house to students, and also taught yoga and English up and down the coast.  I had also taken 2 pottery kilns and 2 wheels with me which took me about 2 years to get set up and I made and exhibited pottery.

A personal drama involved me being beaten up in the square in front of a crowd of people by the mother of a man I spent one night with.

My youngest daughter almost died of an illness which is rarer in Spain than leprosy, called leismania, it is transmitted by a sand fly from an infected dog.  She was gravely ill with only 40 white blood corpuscles in her body and the whole family had to fly over from England.  She was kept in isolation in hospital.   She also had her education there from age 11 to 19 and did the first year of her degree in Granada University.  She began her schooling there by trekking down goat tracks and river beds and up mountain paths to a remote village school.

My other daughter worked training horses at Spanish riding stables with 65 horses. Looking after our own horse was endlessly challenging especially as they had the African horse sickness disease there when we arrived and thousands of horses were dropping dead within a few hours of contracting it.

The story also includes many interesting tales of eccentric characters such as Henry, half Spanish, half Indian, who left a good job in a London bank and bought a piece of land on a 45 degree hill several miles down a dirt track from a remote village.  He built a small hut and lived there with no water, electricity, or toilet.  He also had no money and no job.  He did a bit of busking with his guitar to be able to buy some food.

Then there was Dieter, who arrived in our village every winter, moved into someone’s tiny log shed for 6 months, slept on the floor and cooked up wild plants for his food.  The remaining 6 months of the year, he lived in the upstairs of someone’s barn, over some donkeys. An artist friend in another remote village suddenly discovered after 35 years of marriage that her husband was a transvestite, who walked round the tiny cobbled streets dressed up in all her clothes to the amazement of the locals.

We met many fascinating people, including the late Prince Tianne Doan, the last husband of the Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton, he was a friend of a close friend in the village, where we had many social gatherings.  Tianne came to me for healings and a condition that he had had for 20 years was healed.  He had been to a great number of specialists all over the world without success.  We became friends with Leonardo, the lead singer of Los Paraguayos, the well known band in the seventies.  The late Lonnie Donegan came to one of my clinics for healing and I met Ronnie Knight on a couple of occasions in the bar he owned before he gave himself up to the police and went to jail. We also met the late Phil Lynott, lead singer of the band Thin Lizzie.

Tired of the struggle against corruption, the court cases, battles and hostility within our village, we returned to the UK after 8 years, after which it took 4 years to sell the property.