Idle Thoughts

The start of this goes back many years. Exactly how many is hard to say, as the idea didn’t just pop into my head - it sort of evolved.

The plan was to find a place where I could persue my main hobby of astronomy. Doing this in England, from a pocket-handerchief backgarden is a rather futile experience. Since my garden is too closed in, what with the house on one side and large trees in a lot of neighbouring gardens, there is a strict limit on what I can see. The light pollution severely limits the quality of the images I get and the lack of space for an observatory means that it takes a lot of precious observing time to get everything set up on nights when there are no clouds.

From this you can tell that I wasn’t looking for the average holiday home: sun, sea and sangria.

Plan “A” was to look for a site in the Canaries, probably on Tenerife or La Palma. The attractions that these islands have is their southerly location and remoteness. Also, being part of Spain (but strictly speaking outside the E.U.) I would not have any problem buying a property or spending time there. A few trips confirmed my views that these islands were, indeed, the place to be. At this point some reality found its way into my thought process.

The first problem was one of accessibility. Since I was not planning to move out there permanently, I wanted somewhere that I could get to reasonably easily. Tenerife isn’t too bad as there are quite a few flights from the UK. Even in cooler times of the year it’s still possible (with a bit of planning) to get out there at a reasonable cost. La Palma too, is possible although it involves catching an island hopper from Tenerife. However, there’s a big difference between 2 weeks in the sun once a year and making regular trips to a house you own. The first question was one of transport: hiring a car (definitely a necessity) for a lengthy trip does increase the cost quite a lot. Buying one on the island for use during trips is a possibility, but cars in Spain are not cheap and secondhand ones are much more expensive than in the UK.

The second question that came to mind was how to actually get my stuff out there. If I’d been planning to move, lock-stock and barrel, I could have got the professionals in and just had my furniture, telescopes (but see a later post) and other stuff transported in one go. Since this wasn’t my situation, I needed to be sure that I would be able to take stuff over at my leisure. Since both locations are islands, this would involve more hassle with shipping companies and possibly multiple steps: UK to Spain, Spain to the Canaries.

The third practicality was cost and availability. Being small islands, the choice of property is rather limited. Also, as they are being developed for tourism, most of the places I saw were in costal resorts - exactly wrong for what I wanted. On Tenerife, the ideal location was in the National Park in the centre of the island. However, being a nature reserve meant that new building was strictly regulated and therefore what was available was very expensive and much sought after.

In the end common sense prevailed. I took the view that while the Canaries were nearly 10degrees nearer the equator than southern spain, the practical difficulties of transport, access and suitable houses overweighed the additional benefits. So Andalucia it was …..

My criteria were still the same. A house with little or no light pollution, good all-round visibility and some land to site my telescopes on. Now these attributes take an awful lot for granted. Things I didn’t really appreciate until I started looking at actual houses on the ground in Spain itself.

If you want to read a more technical analysis of my choices, go to my astronomy website and
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