please help...need advice

[getouttaengland]

Hello everyone,
i have fallen in love with the amazing country and will be moving out to la zenia way at the beggining of next year with my fiancee and son, i have heard to register him at school i would need to go to the town hall.
Any idea where the local on will be and do i need an appointment etc etc?
Pleas help
Thanks

[Mazzer]

Hi there, as no one has bothered to answer I will, even though I have not registered a child at School. If you are moving to La Zenia your nearest ayuntamiento (town hall ) is in Playa Flamenca (just up the road) and as far as I know you do not need an appointment I think they operate a ticket system so first come first served. Also I do know that the law has now changed in as much that you now need to get a residency form first in order to apply for the padron which is a sort of local register, once you have got on the padron then you can register your child at the school of your choice in that area. To apply for the residency form you have to go to Orihuela Police station I think then after that you go to the Playa Flamenca town hall and just sign on the padron. You do need to fill in a form for residency and I think you get that at the town hall also, so my advice would be to go to the town hall first and ask all the relevent questions and get the proper forms, they can be quite helpful in there if you catch them on a good day LOL. Good luck and Bienvenido to Spain ( I hope I spelt that right)

[CathM]

You need to have NIE and residentia now for your son to start school, both of these can be applied for at the town hall, Playa Flamenca. Out of interest, how old is your son?

Cath

[the-celtic-warrior]

As one who came here but a few years ago, how I wish I could sell up and return to Scotland. Think long and hard about what you are doing. The move has ruined the lives of many including mine. Do not trust any builder or estate agent ever. Don't let the sun frizzle your brains. The streets here are not paved with gold but with good intentions. Remember, if you are under 65 - you will need private health care. I was turned away the other day from the clinic because on my European Health Card, help was only given for 6 months. Go home, easily said - that is not an option because my home is now my wife's who is divorcing me leaving me here with an unsaleable property in the middle of a half completed building site which has been this way now for 6 years. Having had the rubbish bins placed outside my house which are permanently overflowing and cockroach infested, I would strongly recommend you re think everything. And if you have children, even more so.
The Daily Telegraph of Saturday 26th July, 2008 carried a full page article on the nightmare of La Zenia entitled 'Dreams that crumbled in the sun'
Go to your library and get a copy and read it and then think.

[Chrisdee]

Is this the article?

They sell dreams, the property developers of the Costa Blanca, of ornate villas set between fiery red mountains and the azure sea.

Little Moorish palaces surrounded by manicured lawns, perfect for the about-to-retire British couple wanting to escape grey skies and taxes on everything. God's waiting room in the sun – with golf thrown in.

Peter – not his real name – had his dream. Five years ago, he and his wife sold their bungalow in south-west England for £270,000.

They used half of the proceeds to buy a house in Britain for their two sons, and reserved half for their palace, a house in a new development called the Albatera Golf and Country Club, 20 minutes by motorway from Alicante.

The Spanish developers, San Jose Inversiones, called the house design an Amapola. They had lots of designs: Tulipans, Rositas and Marbellas – a tower here, a balcony there, whatever the customer desired.

"It was right on the golf course with the mountains in the background," says Peter. "The club was to have a swimming pool and a bar; and if we wanted to go to the beach, it was only half an hour away."

Peter, who worked for a brewery before retirement, had it all worked out. He would rise in the morning, greet the mountains and set off for a round of golf.

His wife, a keep-fit instructor, would offer private classes to other residents to supplement their pension. They handed over £82,000 as a deposit and waited for the club to be built. It never was.

Today, the Albatera Golf and Country Club consists of a few show homes, a row of apartments and nothing else. It was pitched as a new La Manga – an upmarket resort combining golf with some 1,100 homes and two hotels. That is now mere hubris.

Peter, who doesn't want his identity known because he still hopes to get his money back, hasn't seen his deposit since 2003. In May, San Jose was placed into administration, another casualty of Spain's imploding property market.

The company had failed to secure full planning permission for Albatera and other sites. Then the bank stopped lending.

San Jose claims it has assets of some £300 million, but says it needs a loan of more than £20 million to get things moving again.

In the meantime, Peter and his wife live in an apartment, waiting for their money. They and some 1,500 other buyers must wait to see if the company can be rescued.

"I wish I'd never bloody come," he says. "I wish I was still in England, in my bungalow, with the way of life, and the friends I had there."

Thousands of British buyers are in the same boat. They surrendered deposits for homes often bought off-plan (unbuilt, from the architects' drawings).

Now prices are falling, buyers are disappearing and developers, starved of loans by Spanish banks nervous about international financial instability, are going bust. Along the Costas, developments lie half-finished, without water and electricity, and without any prospect of being sold.

For Spain's notoriously corrupt and capricious planning regime, which gave birth to the developments now disfiguring virtually all the country's Mediterranean coastline, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Houses built on the nod of corrupt mayors are being refused retrospective planning permission by regional administrations under pressure from the green lobby. Many properties, new and not-so-new, are blighted by illegality and are the effectively worthless; others have simply been demolished.

Scan the websites used by current or potential British expatriates and you will find people desperate for advice about how to reclaim deposits that they will, in many cases, never see again – and all at the wrong end of life, when lost savings cannot be recouped.

Even the biggest Spanish firms are going under. Last week, Martinsa-Fadesa, a major and respected player, filed for bankruptcy.

Gwilym Rhys-Jones is a financial investigator based on the Costa del Sol, and a longtime observer of the Spanish property scene. He says that even large, well-known builders were accepting deposits for off-plan developments that had no planning permission.

"These things are no more than pipe dreams, but there was such a ready supply of British and north European buyers that all they had to do was show them a pretty drawing and they were falling over themselves to buy them."

Drive along the coast south of Alicante and the results of the Spanish property bubble are there to see: serried ranks of exquisitely tasteless, often empty, villas advancing in close order up isolated, parched hillsides. Many have been built in locations totally unsuitable for housing: by the sides of dual carriageways, away from shops and amenities – anywhere that developers could find a landowner willing to sell.

Property has driven the Spanish economy like no other in the European Union. Last year, housing investment accounted for a tenth of GDP and 13 per cent of private sector jobs. More than four million dwellings have been built in the last decade, a boom fuelled partly by an influx of British retirees (some three-quarters of a million Britons now reside in Spain). Britain's Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors says the number of homes built last year would be excessive even given steady market conditions, never mind a downturn.

But it's on the Costas where the developers are really hurting. La Axarquia is part of Malaga province, a constellation of 29 coastal and inland councils. Ask about the number of illegally built properties in La Axarquia and the official figure will be about 10,000. Local environmentalists put that at more than 20,000.

"In Marbella, the local council is calling on the regional authorities to retrospectively authorise illegally built properties because otherwise mortgages cannot be raised on them," says Mr Rhys-Jones. "In other words, they want to draw a line under the old era."

However, he does not believe the property industry will be cleaned up any time soon. "In my town of Estepona, the mayor was elected in May on an anti-corruption ticket. He is now awaiting trial, charged with money laundering, and influence-peddling relating to planning permission."

Housebuilding was popular with ordinary Spaniards, struggling to match the living standards of their more developed partners in the EU. Unfettered building was a vote-winner with local electorates because of the money it injected. Smallholdings, worth next to nothing as agricultural land, suddenly took on great value. Helping it all in recent years was the pound's strength against the euro, making Spain an attractive destination for elderly British couples wanting to maximise their pensions.

Now, the pound has dropped and the developers are finding fewer takers from the UK. The result is an enormous glut. Prices are falling relentlessly on the Costas, destroying the hopes of Britons who bought properties as investments.

Tina Reeves, who has worked as an estate agent in Spain for the last 18 years, says tortuous planning laws are part of the problem. "Licences granted by local councils to developers are being rescinded by the regional authorities," she explains. "It's not the fault of the developers, it's the fault of local councils granting licences and not passing it by the region. Also, not many Spanish banks are lending at the moment. They are getting uptight because even they don't know whether anything is legal any more."

Drive inland, a few miles from the Costa Blanca resort of Torrevieja, and you come to the village of San Miguel. As recently as 25 years ago it was an isolated spot, accessible only by a potholed road. Now it is thriving, partly thanks to an influx of expatriates such as Margaret and her friend Melvyn, both from south Yorkshire.

Margaret moved to Spain a decade ago. She feels sorry for people like Peter, but says they are often victims of their own naivety. "People leave their brains at Gatwick. You wouldn't part with your money that easily in the UK, but when they get here, they do. Spanish people will not sign unless everything is in order.

"They bring these people out from England on short breaks and show them a new-build property or a plan and tell them, 'This is your dream' – and it is a dream. The amount of building has gone mad. There is hardly a patch of coastline not built on. When we came here, you would have detached properties with a bit of land. Now it's apartments and houses crammed together."

The value of Margaret's pension has dropped with the pound – the rising euro means she is worse off by the equivalent of a weekly shop – but she says he and her husband would never return to Britain. "I wouldn't go back. I don't think I could afford to live there, to be honest."

Melvyn, a former environmental health officer, is very pro-Spanish. However, he warns: "Corruption is commonplace. They bring you out here and show you a patch of land with a view and it looks beautiful. But when you hand over money you have saved all your life, you find they've built another house a few yards away and there's no view."

A few miles away, Peter is sitting in his apartment, musing on the last few years.

"If we went back I think we would say, 'Well, we lived in Spain for two years. It was an experience. There were a lot of good things and a lot of bad.' "

His wife appears more accepting of misfortune.

"I had the image of running private keep-fit," she says wistfully. "You looked out and the mountains were right on top of you. I loved the idea of that."

As a kind of remedy, the couple have been offered an apartment being built at another site. But "it's not what we wanted", says Peter, the stress telling in his voice.

His dream of golf in the morning and a mountain view at sunset is likely to remain just that.

[the-celtic-warrior]

Yes, bang on. You are very clever to find it. I could not. The photographs that go with this article show La Zenia urbanisations including many of the unfinished ones around the San Jose estates. I think everyone thinking about coming here should read this and do a lot of thinking. I am surprised people still think this place can be a land of dreams what with the property crisis, the falling pound and the fuss over sewerage running down the streets and so on. The stench by the fereteria at Cabo Roig sometimes - phew !

[the-celtic-warrior]

Telegraph have article as Costa Del Sol - but the first line makes it clear it talks about here. Link below:

[Nalle]

I feel sorry for Peter and persons in his situation, But as Margaret said, If they would done their research and homework, it wouldnt have happened to them.
For every horrorstory there are so many more success stories.

This is an article in that I read on the BBC online, but you can find it on several online newspapers

"The UK offers among the lowest quality of life in Europe despite residents earning the highest incomes, according to research.

The price of fuel and other essential goods, below average spending on health and education, short holidays and late retirement place the UK just above Ireland at the bottom of the uSwitch.com European quality of life
index.

Although British families earn more than £10,000 more than the European average, they pay the highest prices for diesel, 18% above the average, and the second highest price for unleaded petrol, 6% more than average. They also pay 49% more for gas and 5% more for electricity - the third highest prices in Europe.

UK spending on healthcare and education is below the European average while life expectancy is the third lowest at 78.9 years, compared to 80.9 in France or 80.7 in Sweden.

Workers have the third highest retirement age and suffer the shortest holiday entitlement - a week below average, according to the study. The weather adds to to the grim tally, with Britain receiving 80% less sunshine than Spain and 17% less than the European average.

A total of 41,026 residents left the UK in 2006, the highest number in Europe, with total emigration increasing by 30% from the UK since 2001.
The study assessed 19 factors to rank the UK in relation to nine other major countries across Europe.

Spain offers the best quality of life in Europe, despite families earning an annual net income of just £16,789 - £8,500 below the average and less than half that of the UK.

The country enjoys low taxation, cheaper essential goods, higher than average life expectancy and a generous holiday allowance, uSwitch said.
France came second, boasting the second highest spend on healthcare and the highest holiday allowance at 40 days."

Spain is a lovely place to live in. But do not expect it to be a walk in the park. Too many people come here and expect to work less and earn more.
Do your homework. Do your numbers. Be careful, but dont be afraid to move here.