Decision to Move Abroad – Part 3: From l’Estartit to a Feed Full of Farmhouses
By the time we were ready to actually start looking at property, l’Estartit felt like the obvious place to begin. It was our holiday spot, the place we knew best, the place that already felt a bit like home whenever we landed there. So that’s where we started.
Looking back now, I think we underestimated how different it feels to search for a home somewhere versus just visiting it. When you’re on holiday, you notice the good things and let the rest slide off you — the sea, the food, the long evenings. You’re not thinking about drainage, or how far the nearest doctor is, or what a place feels like in November when the tourists have gone and it’s just you and whoever else actually lives there. The moment we started treating l’Estartit as a place to buy, rather than a place to visit, it started showing us a different side of itself. Not a worse side, necessarily. Just a more honest one.
Our budget was €100,000. That figure mattered from the very first search, because it ruled out a lot of what came up — and it also came with a condition neither of us was willing to bend on: we wanted a house, not an apartment. After years of apartment living, both of us felt the same way about it — you never really get full privacy in a block, there’s always someone’s footsteps overhead or a shared wall carrying every conversation. If we were going to uproot our whole lives and move to another country, we weren’t going to do it just to swap one set of thin walls for another. If we were going to do this, it had to be a proper house — something with a door you could close on the world, and mean it.
It didn’t take long to hit our first wall. Houses in l’Estartit were almost all priced above €200,000 — double what we had to spend, and not something we could stretch to no matter how much we loved the town. I won’t pretend that wasn’t a hard evening. We sat with the laptop between us, refreshing listing after listing, watching the same pattern repeat itself: a house we liked, a price we couldn’t touch. There’s a particular kind of disappointment in falling for a place that has already fallen for someone with a bigger budget. It stung a little, if I’m honest — you build up an idea of where you’re going to live, sometimes without even realising you’ve done it, and then the numbers tell you otherwise, flatly, with no room for negotiation. But it wasn’t enough to put us off the idea altogether. If anything, it made the whole thing feel more real — this wasn’t a fantasy anymore, it was a project with constraints, and projects with constraints are the ones that actually happen. It just meant we had to widen the search.
Looking South: Granada and Andalucía
We turned our attention further south, to Granada and the wider Andalucía region, hoping the budget would stretch further there. For a short while, it felt like relief. There’s a strange lightness that comes over you when a search that’s been nothing but “no” for weeks suddenly starts saying “maybe” — the prices dropped, the listings multiplied, and for an evening or two we let ourselves get a bit excited again. In some ways it did stretch further — there were listings as low as €20,000 — but almost all of the cheap ones were apartments, which put us straight back to square one. The few houses within range tended to sit in areas that just didn’t look welcoming from what we could see, and that relief we’d felt started curdling into something closer to frustration.
And that “what we could see” is doing a lot of work, because a lot of the local estate agents don’t give you the actual address of a property. You’re left going mostly on your first impression of the listing photos, which isn’t much to build a decision on when you’re talking about buying a house in another country. It’s an odd feeling, trying to imagine your future life in a place you’re not even allowed to locate on a map. You start reading things into photographs that probably aren’t there — is that street quiet, or just quiet in that one frame? Is that neighbour’s balcony a sign of a friendly street, or nothing at all? You end up doing a strange kind of guesswork with your own future.
On top of the price and privacy issue, Lesley wasn’t convinced either way, and this is where I think we both learned something about how differently we search for a home. I could look past a lot if the price was right and the house had potential. Lesley couldn’t, and she was right not to. Her objection wasn’t really about the house or even the price, it was about the area itself — she didn’t want to end up living somewhere touristic, somewhere that empties out every October and fills back up with strangers every June. She’d say it plainly: what’s the point of moving somewhere for a quieter life if the place itself was built around noise? What we were actually after was something quieter: a bit of distance from the busier centres, with a small town nearby for the everyday shopping, rather than a resort strip built around summer visitors. Andalucía, for all its charm, didn’t quite give us that, and as much as it disappointed me at the time, I’ve come to think Lesley’s instinct there was the more honest one of the two of us.
A Detour to Sicily
Sicily came up next, mostly because of how close it is to Malta — about a 20-minute flight, which makes it an easy place to get to and from. We’d already been over a few times before any of this house-hunting started, just for short breaks, and I have nothing but good things to say about the island. Beautiful scenery, and the food is some of the best I’ve had anywhere. On paper, of everywhere we’d looked so far, Sicily made the most sense. It’s close enough that leaving Malta wouldn’t really feel like leaving at all — family and friends a short hop away, familiar flavours, a culture that in a lot of ways isn’t so far removed from our own.
Language was never going to be an issue either. I speak Italian fluently, so there was no barrier there at all — I could have walked into any estate agent’s office in Palermo or Catania and been perfectly understood. Every practical objection I could throw at the idea, I could answer myself. That’s rare, in this whole process. Most places we looked at, something concrete got in the way — the money, the distance, the language, the paperwork. Sicily didn’t hand me a single one of those excuses.
And yet something held me back. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was, and I still can’t today. It wasn’t the island, it wasn’t the people, it wasn’t the food. I’ve turned it over in my head more times than I can count, trying to find the practical reason hiding underneath the feeling, and I’ve never found one. A lot of Maltese buy property in Sicily, either to retire there or to use as a holiday home, and on paper we ticked every box to do the same. But I just wasn’t inclined to go through with it. Maybe it’s the fact that it would have been too easy, too close to what we already knew — and some part of me wanted this move to actually change something, not just relocate the same life twenty minutes away by plane. I don’t know. Sometimes a place doesn’t fit, and you don’t get a tidy explanation for why. You just have to trust the feeling and move on, even when everyone around you, including your own reasoning, is telling you it doesn’t make sense.
When the Algorithm Gets Involved
Around this time, something a bit strange started happening. Every time I opened Facebook or YouTube, property adverts were waiting for me — Tuscany, Sicily, France, Spain, Portugal, and one I hadn’t thought about at all: Abruzzo. It felt less like coincidence and more like the internet had been listening in on every conversation Lesley and I had been having at home. We’d joke about it over dinner — “the phone’s eavesdropping on us again” — but underneath the joke there was something almost comforting about it. After weeks of narrowing options down, here was a screen quietly widening them back out again, throwing new names at us we’d never have thought to search for ourselves.
Most of it I scrolled past. I’d look at a Tuscany farmhouse for a few seconds and swipe on, the way you do with adverts, half-interested and half on autopilot. But Abruzzo kept resurfacing, in a way none of the others did. It wasn’t a name I knew anything about — I couldn’t have told you where it was on a map, or what the region was known for, or a single town within it. And maybe that’s exactly why it caught my attention when the others didn’t. Everywhere else we’d looked so far came loaded with expectations — l’Estartit with its memories, Andalucía with its price tags, Sicily with that stubborn feeling I couldn’t explain. Abruzzo came with nothing at all. No history, no baggage, no reason to feel anything about it one way or the other. Just a name, appearing again and again, quietly asking to be looked into.
Eventually curiosity got the better of me. That’s where the next part of this story really begins — but I’ll save that for the next post, when I’ll write about how we first came across Torrebruna, and how we ended up in touch with the agency that would eventually make the whole thing real: Abruzzo Rural Property.