Buying and renovating a rural property on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees

It’s been a busy week and sadly I’ve been neglecting my riding and trail maintenance lately… .

On Thursday I did manage to join Angel from “Zona-Zero” though and we did some trail-clearing out near Route ZL-004, which is one of the “Light” routes. This particular one is near the “Muro de Roda” which is a very old castle up on a hill. The plan is to clear several old paths and cut a few new ones in the area to form a network of trails with Route ZL-004 as the “Base route”.

Our first Christmas in Spain . . . .

It’s been nice. We’ve been well looked after (and very well FED) by our neighbours, the families of our neighbours and by the British couple who live in a town 60km away but have a weekend place in our village.

Christmas and New Year have been pretty much as I expected they would be, because I’ve had many years of Christmases in the UK – but for Mrs Spekkie it’s been very different. Coming from South Africa she’s used to Summer at Christmas! This Winter weather is killing her and she’s a long way from family. Face-Time has helped us keep in touch though 🙂

We had supper on Christmas Eve in a nearby town with family of neighbours. The meal started at 9pm and finished at 2am. Some of the other guests arrived just after midnight!

Christmas day was a huge meal with Ramon the friendly farmer and his wife Rosa & some of their friends. Many varied courses and much wine!

Boxing day with the British couple and they did a traditional Christmas roast. Very nice.

New Years Eve was quiet and then on New Years Day we were invited to our local church up on the hill for the “blessing of the New Year”. It was all in Spanish and the church is Catholic – but I think I got the gist of it . . . .

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope 2017 is a good one for you all!

I really enjoy reading this thread although I have no specific vested interest.

I did suggest way back in the thread that ‘Driving Over Lemons’ was a good book to read with very similar circumstances to yours.

What appears to hold true from the book and the last few pages of experiences now that you have settled in is that it is all about community and helping out your neighbours.

What a fantastic place and way to live.

🙂

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope 2017 is a good one for you all!

You too. Enjoying following your adventure!

Cheers PJ!

First week of January and between around 11am and 4pm the weather here really is beautiful!

Checking out more local trails for the bike and soaking up the winter sunshine . . . .

8)

Hope you’ve got provisions in, snow tomorrow on this side of the hill and on your lump of limestone too I guess.

The winter weather that a lot of northern and eastern Europe has been experiencing over the last few weeks was headed towards the Pyrenees yesterday and got there last night.

Up in the Alto-Pyrenees – places like Bielsa & the Ski resort of Benasque – nearly a meter of snow has fallen and the tunnel from France that our friends from the UK came through when they visited us back in the summer is currently closed, as is the tunnel at Somport, north of Jaca.

Ainsa has a bit of a cold wind blowing through it at the moment but sunny skies – no rain or snow here and it was up around 11 degrees when we popped to the shops earlier.
Cold but certainly not too cold.

Guaso today was sunny and fairly warm if you kept out of the slight wind 🙂

We can see the snow that fell on our nearest mountain, the Peña Montañesa, last night but it’s all above about 2000m. You can see the bad weather behind the mountains but, despite the snow blowing towards us from France, it’s not making it as far as us.

This is the sort of “bad weather” I don’t mind – when you can just see it in the distance . . .

This picture of Ainsa “Old Town” being used in the latest tourism initiative from our local area council.

(From Facebook)

Corona de Aragon
22 November 2015

Hello. Very good morning. We want to collaborate from crown of Aragon with this initiative of treasures of Aragon to publicize locations of our land, Aragon. We need your help. The shape is very simple, give the likes and / or share this message. The first town we want to make known to the whole world, is Ainsa. Help us, we want to reach 25.000 people reached. Thank you.

It’s been a little while since I updated our “Buying & Renovating” thread properly . . . . . . things did not go as planned for us at the beginning of the month and we’ve consequently found ourselves being kept busy with all sorts of things we didn’t expect!

It’s sometimes been difficult to stay positive but we’re still alive and kicking and not ready to give up just yet . . . .

Over the next few days I’ll post updates on all the ups and downs 🙂

Vamos! “next few days” have come and gone – hope things are looking a little more positive now?

Spekkie I know it will be on a previous page but do you have a facebook linky?

surfer – look for “Tony & Andrea’s Big Adventure” on FB.

mogrim . . . .

As anyone following the thread will know, we’ve had lots of delays during our first 12 months here – slowly but surely we’ve plodded on and as I’ve said before, there are worse places than here to be stuck hanging around, that’s for sure. It is all taking it’s toll on us financially and mentally though.

The latest problem we seem to be facing is courtesy of our Bank. Originally they liked our ideas, approved our business plan and agreed (in principal) to lend us the “top up” amount we required to pay for the building work needed to renovate our property into a B&B. Nothing could be finalised until we had planning permission though.

In the (very long) time it took us to obtain our planning permission the EU Court ruled that Spanish Banks had previously acted unlawfully when granting mortgages with “minimum interest rates” attached. Long story short – Spanish Banks are going to have to pay back around 5 Billion Euros between them to customers who were granted mortgages with these minimum interest rates set. As an example, the plumber quoting our heating system was reimbursed 30 000 Euros by his bank recently.

This ruling and the subsequent payments the banks are having to make back to customers seems to have changed the landscape in terms of who banks will lend money to / how much they have available to lend and they are not as keen as they were to lend to us. We are currently waiting to hear from our bank as to where we stand, but in the meantime, we can’t sign contracts with our builder . . . who was expecting to start in the second week of January . . . .

On a more positive note – I was wearing shorts up until a week before Christmas and this week I’ve started wearing them again.

6 weeks of Winter I can live with 🙂

I think you should quote temperatures rather than whether you can wear shorts. I’m only just over the hill where I have seen a couple of runners in shorts but the rest of the population is in jackets and coats..

Just do it all yourself. On n’est jamais mieux servi que par soit-même.

No shorts here on the coast so you are brave up there. It is going dark now at 7ish so the longer days are coming. The wind here has been gusting v strongly over a week now. Yesterday i was walking at 700m and nearly got blown off my feet, days are c 18 degrees so out of the wind you can sit in shorts in the sun.

No shorts here in Madrid but then I’m a big wuss 🙂 Snow forecast for tomorrow, and a biting cold wind today are my excuse.

the EU Court ruled that Spanish Banks had previously acted unlawfully when granting mortgages with “minimum interest rates” attached.

Ah, the “clasulas suelo”. For better or for worse I didn’t have one of those, so my bank doesn’t owe me any money 😕 Sorry to hear that’s affected your plans, first I’ve heard that that particular ruling was affecting consumer credit. I’m sure you’ll get there in the end!

It’s nice, when things are crawling along at a snails pace and the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be on a dimmer switch, to be given some professional reassurance 🙂

When our first choice of bank seemed to be dragging it’s heels with regards to our top-up loan, we started talking in tandem to a second bank. One that specialises in loans for properties in rural areas. The manager there loved our ideas and our business plan but before he could consider our application his risk department needed us to have a “Viability Study” carried out by the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services, who are based in the nearby town of Huesca. It’s a free service that takes about 10 days to complete. We sent them everything we could – business plan, the architects project, a dozen emails with lots of “extra” ideas we’ve had . . .

We met with Susana, the lady from the Dept of Commerce, this week and she gave us her report. We’re thrilled to learn that according to her, based on everything we gave her (and we gave her a lot!) and everything she knows about the expanding tourism and investment in the local area etc etc, we will be successful with our venture 🙂

Of course there will be hard work and long hours, but we can manage that – the view out of the window will remind us why we’re doing it.

We’ve passed the report on to the bank manager and I think he’s as happy as we are.

Now we just have to wait . . . for a change.

I’ve been working here on a side project for a little while now that we thought we’d keep to ourselves until we were sure I’d understood our neighbour “The Friendly Farmer”, correctly. As it turns out, we both understood each other fine and it’s “all systems go”, so here’s the story …

When we were looking for a place to set up and run a B&B we concentrated on looking at places that we thought would appeal to cyclists. We want to cater for everyone but we would also like to have a reputation for being somewhere that can meet the specific needs of cyclists.

We started looking along the Pilgrimage route “El Camino de Santiago de Compostela” but finally settled on the village of Guaso just outside Ainsa, Aragon, in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains.

With its network of well kept local roads threading their way between the mountains and with the hundreds of kilometers of amazing world class Enduro and Mountain Bike Trails of “Zona-Zero”, this place is almost perfect. The only thing we really found lacking in the area, and this was bought to our attention by several families that we got chatting to last summer, was mountain bike rides suitable for mums and children… .

During our first year here we’ve got to know our old “semi-retired” farmer neighbours very well and it became apparent that they own quite a bit of the local countryside. The full extent of which I didn’t appreciate until one day I offered to help the Farmer cut some trees down for next years firewood and he took me on a tractor-tour of the farm to get to the woods where the trees were.

Standing there in the middle of what felt like nowhere, but was actually not too far from our houses through the trees, I was stunned at how big and how beautiful the area was. Amazing views, private woods, streams, fire roads, sheep paths, abandoned houses – you name it, he’s got it. More importantly, I was impressed with how much of the area was relatively flat. I complemented him on his land and told him that it would be amazing for cross-country mountain bike cycling – and perfect for the families of guys who came to stay with us to ride the fairly tough “Zona-Zero” routes. He smiled and said “You are welcome to use this land anyway you want”.

So (and THIS was the bit I needed to make sure I’d understood correctly!) he was allowing me to build what would essentially be our own private mountain bike park, suitable for the families of our guests (and Mrs Spekkie) on his land – right outside our own back door!

I’ve now been trail-building for three weeks. I’ve shown the Farmer the trails I’ve cut so far and he’s very happy with it all. He’s used his tractor to help me clear the main dirt road that goes from the top where our houses are down into the center of the flatter area – the rest I’ve done by hand myself. It’s hard work but it’s very rewarding.

I tested out the first 3km of twisty-trails on Saturday and I’m happy with what I’ve done so far …

We’re amazingly lucky to have been given permission to do this and I’m loving every day of building it.

This picture outlines the rough boundaries of the land we will be using . . .

Some pictures of work on our own personal “Bike Park”.

Ramon the Friendly Farmer helped me with the main dirt road from our houses down to the flat area in the middle of the farm.

This looks great. You taking bookings for 2018…?

Not quite yet. I’ll let you know as soon as we are 🙂

Well Done Spekkie!

Looks great, keep up with the updates!

The other day I skipped doing any work on our “Bike Park” and took Ms Spekkie for a look around. We walked some of the trail I’ve done so far and then we went a bit further down the farm to see an area that I haven’t really explored yet.

As you can see, there’s a lot to do yet!

Looking forward to doing more work soon – I want to get at least one basic circuit finished asap.

Cheers Clobber!

A bit more work on the bike park . . .

The Bike Park and the Farm above it are all on a hillside so whenever it rains, even if it’s only a light rain, you end up with quite a bit of water coming down and funneling into a few specific places. No problem for the tractor but not so good for cars or bikes.

I diverted the water away from this access road further up the hill and now Ramon is using the tractor to level off what was previously was a “part-time river” . . .

Really pleased with my old car. For a quite heavy front wheel drive station wagon – it can get almost anywhere!

I’ve obviously checked the drive time from Paris, looks more like a flight to me !

I suspect it’s 9 hrs from Paris Jambalaya?

Today I walked the entire length of the Mountain Bike Trail that I’ve cut/cleared/built so far. From our house in Guaso, through the farm yard and down onto the farm land.

I took tools with me because I knew I had to widen a couple of corners that I had thought were ok but turned out to be a bit too tight on a bike (I’m on a 29er) when I tested the trail the other day.

Aside from that it was just a case of trimming a few bushes and kicking a few stones out the way as I walked – most of the trail was good. I’m pleased. It’s only about 3km long so far but it’s a good start. More trail building tomorrow 🙂

For the last week or so I’ve been splitting my time between working on the first section of Bike Park MTB Trail – which is now complete 🙂 and working on the main dirt road that goes down onto the farm.

I’ll test the newly completed first section of MTB Trail on my bike tomorrow to see how it feels.

The dirt road, which needs some serious re-modelling to try and prevent it from flooding and becoming waterlogged for a week whenever it rains, is more of an ongoing project. It’s about 1000m long and has several sections that turn into quite a muddy-stream when it rains, so I’m trying to slope it into waterways I’m cutting beside the road. The first dodgy section is done and we will see next time it rains whether I got it right or not. The other problem areas will be dealt with one by one … .

Mud-fest part one – before and after pics …

“Zona Zero”, the name given to the world famous Mountain Biking Trail Area that we live in the middle of, has been given the “Seal of Tourist Excellence” for the third consecutive year 🙂

Well done to everyone involved. These are the trails that I ride every time I take my MTB out and the award is well deserved!

Summer and Winter water levels at the local “Mediano” Reservoir . . .

Brilliant.
I was only telling the missus the other day about your thread & how it would be a lovely region to visit.
I’m also interested for 2018. 😀

Brilliant.
I was only telling the missus the other day about your thread & how it would be a lovely region to visit.
I’m also interested for 2018.

Cool!
The riding is amazing and it’s a beautiful area with lots of “non-riding” stuff to do and see.

Keep watching this space 🙂

Enjoyable read and nice to see your keeping it updated. It’s appealing to see you throw yourself into this, learning new skills as you go along. I wish you good luck too !

Enjoyable read and nice to see your keeping it updated. It’s appealing to see you throw yourself into this, learning new skills as you go along. I wish you good luck too !

Cheers!

I’m enjoying it.

🙂

I reckon those new skills should include DIY. Clearing trails is all very well but it’s time you could be using to do stuff you’ll be paying slow-working tradesmen to do when they feel like it. Your priority should be getting rooms ready to let and people in them. Get stuck in! Both of you.

The nearest road-climb from my house (and there are many, believe me!) is the climb from just outside Boltaña, up to the village of Campodarbe.

It starts about 6km from home and is a 7km climb that ascends around 450m (1476ft). You can go up it as many times as you like and every time you go up you get to roll back down again.

What more could you ask for?