Sue-Tom

Hola,
my family are hoping to move to Ayamonte end of 2006. I see lots of threads for Esuri or Canela, With people having lots of problems, but wondered if there was anyone out there already settled in Ayamonte town? and are you happy with your property purchase?


Sue

finca steve

Hi Sue,

We have a small guest house about 15 miles up the river Guadiana so not quite Ayamonte. We have been here for 4 years and love it. From chums we know that have bought in Ayamonte we have heard about many of the usual house buying problems but most seem to be pretty happy with what they ended up with. When we get to old to climb our drive we will probably move down there as it is a great town.

Good luck with the move.

Send me a PM if you want to know anything specific and I will try to help.

Steve

poollounger

I remember seeing a piece of land with a ruin for sale on the Guadiana with river frontage...beyond my abilities and price range but dreams of having a riverside guest house with a private jetty were alluring. Does you guest house run successfully ?? Are there many visitors further inland ??You are right Ayamonte itself is charming. Those lovely cobbled streets, the square. I hope it is still the same by the time you move to the town. However I am glad I wasn't seduced by CE, as I almost was. All the hype of price increases with every new release etc etc. Even managed to be there on a Bank Holiday when the site was empty so sneaked up there and wandered around, climbing ladders etc to check out the view. It all seemed so easy at the time..pay your deposit, staged payments and voila life in the sun.For a lot less money I managed to get my own villa with my own pool and garden. I hope it all works out for the folks who have bought out there, but it taught me an exemplary lesson about not being seduced by furnished show houses and artists impressions.

Sue-Tom

Hola Steve,
Glad to hear of someone being happy with their life style over there. May use your guest house if family pop over to visit

regards
Sue

Sue-Tom

We had a look at CE but decided wasn't quite right for us to live there. We are hoping to complete up at the "Balcon Del Guardiana" having super views of the international bridge and river over to portugal. We had some good holidays at Isla canela and fell in love with Ayamonte. The friendly family atmosphere around the square at night, plenty of Spanish restaurants and bars.

regards
Sue

finca steve

Hi Poollounger,

Successsful? Depends what you mean. Do we make money? Not really. Do we get visitors, yes but not enough. Do we enjoy what we do? Yes immensely. Yes we are riverside with a hectare of land a pontoon and couple of boats for our guests to use on the river. So all in all we feel it is successful providing my state pension kicks in before we run out of savings!

We have to work at getting people away from the coast but most who have been really do appreciate the peace and quiet and natural beauty of the area, we do need guests however, about double the current number would be good, but hey I must stop whingeing and get out to the pool.

Where are you with your villa? We were pre CE thank god and I wonder why so many who have bought there seem so unhappy with what they purchased. At least Fadesa is a large Spanish company with a reasonable reputation so there should be a chance of it being completed.

Drop by and see us if you fancy an offroad trip down our 4 kilometer country road some time, better call first to make sure we are in though.

cheers

finca steve

You and your famliy will be more than welcome. Our web site has all the details.

Keep in touch and good luck with your purchase.




Hasta luego
steve

Cptnemo

Hi

Have seen your website and I must say it looks wonderful, have visited the tiny pueblo and almost lost the front bumper of the car !! very picturesque and narrow.

Unfortunately we cant move to the area full time, but in the future who knows! - we did buy on CE - and to be honest we're very happy with it - especially as the majority of our neighbours are Spanish - this may be as we bought a long long time ago, and our motivation wasn't financial.

Ayamonte is lovely, but it's a shame that the number of banks + estate agents have increased, hopefully it will retain its Spanish charm.

Lets hope that CE + IC will help promote your business
Envious from Wokingham
Al

finca steve

Hi Cptnemo,

thanks for the kind comments, I got a rocket for advertising however so must be more careful in future!

It's good to read about someone who is happy for a change. All the forums I have looked at do seem to contain their fair number of dissatisified contiributors. I suppose things are always different buying or living in another culture but then that it our choice. When we moved here I looked on it as if we were moving to another county in the UK, what with air travel being so cheap it was, and is, easy to get back to our roots and after all life is about learning to live with others and exploring new horizons.

Quite agree about all the estate agents and banks in Ayamonte but then I guess they are only responding to a demand. At least it is no where near as bad as where we used to live in Lymington where the shop rentals and rates were so high that the only new small businesses that could afford to come in were the charity shops so we ended up with a high steet full of secondhand goods shops. Not particularly charming.

Anyway enough of this ramble, my message to people out there who are buying here in Spain is that the gamble if that is what it is, is worth it only if you remember that you will always be a guest in the country, try to learn with language and mix in with the locals and for heavens sake enjoy your selves! If you are buying only to make money then the risk is higher and you have to be prepared to accept that and just like gambling anywhere else. Nothing is 100% guaranteed.

Cheers

Steve

poollounger

Steve all that living by the Guadiana must be doing the trick, as your posts are always cheerful and optimistic !! I remember sitting in the Parador on the cliff top at Ayamonte with an estate agent trying to persuade me to buy something or the other as a ketch sailed into the river, the setting sun behind the sails..idyllic. Are the boats you have on your jetty sailing dinghies or power boats ?? I am afraid I missed the link....perhaps a pvt message ?? PL

Casa Santo Estevo

Steve
It’s great to see we are not the only mad Northern Europeans running a B&B! We use Europeans, as Irene is Dutch.
Good luck with your business. However to get more guests in maybe you should have your web site in Spanish too. We don’t rely solely on the British/Dutch market. If we did we would go out of business straight away! Also a tip for more business is to register your house in TopRural . It is probably the best web site for casa rurals here in Spain. We have got a fair few bookings from the site.

finca steve

Hi PL,

maybe its the cheap plonk that keeps me optimistic?

The pontoon we have is really only for small dinghies but we have a couple of sail boats on moorings. One is my 20 m schooner that hopefully we have sold and the other is a 30 foot Jeanneau sunlight which is the replacment sailing boat. Also there is a launch for commutting in the river and so on. You may have seen the schooner as she shows up well if the flight path of your plane comes into Faro from the west, it goes right down the river and turns west just north of us. Also if you ever go to Alcoutim in Portugal following the river road you will pass a look out point that is directly opposite us.

Sorry about the link but the eagle eyed moderator edited it out. It should be on my signature however.

Where did you finally end up?

Regards

Casa Santo Estevo

Steve
You can always add your web site to your private details then others can hit the link there. We too also had our signature with our web site but they don’t like it either.

finca steve

thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. I am checking the link you suggest as I write. The problem is knowing where to place the ads. With a small if not none existant advertising budget we need to be pretty selective and there are a host of sites we could subscribe to. We have always got good responses from holidayletting.co.uk. In fact they have produced about 90% of our bookings so we are reasonably happy with them.

I agree with getting the page out there in Spanish and of course any other language so we are alson a site which translates the details into 20 other languages for you pretty useful and we have had enquiries from one or two strange places.

Where are you located? Maybe worth a trip one day to see how others do it.

cheers and dank u wal or something like that.

Casa Santo Estevo

Steve... have sent you a long list via a PM of web sites that you may find of interest.