So, Malaga. Well, I didn’t expect that!

For context, last year I thought I wanted to move to Crete. That was until I went to Crete. I tried to see past the weather, which all last year I seemed to take with me, but there’s just not enough there. And on a very practical note, Spanish at least uses the same alphabet as us which should give me a bit of a head-start as I spend the next two months trying to learn it past “Un cerveza por favor”.

I’d read that Malaga was nice and with its transport links, infrastructure and it being on the Costa del Sol, it would be a place to consider, but I didn’t really think I’d like it as much as I did.

I arrived on Epiphany, the last day of Christmas, and as this is a proper old-fashioned God-fearing country, it was a holiday. Which meant that the shops were closed, everyone was wearing nice clothes wandering around the streets, and lots of eating and drinking was going on. Shops were closed but bars and restaurants were very much open.

I stayed for three days and concluded that it wouldn’t be somewhere I wanted to live, but it’s a close-run thing: It has beautiful architecture, a fantastic cathedral, and the Alcazaba and the medieval castle are right up my calle

I will go back and reassess it because its only real downsides are that the port dominates the seafront right in front of the historic old town and it ain’t pretty; and its quite big and big places can be lonely, especially one with a high population turnover in the summer. I didn’t really go into the real world of Malaga but stayed in the old town the whole time, so I can’t say I actually know what it would be like to live there,

I just see myself in a smaller town.

Eating out is relatively expensive compared to other places, but it’s still astonishingly cheap by UK standards, and I have yet to cook my own food as I’ve been in hotels since I got here so don’t really know how cheap it is to live here properly.

Malaga is nice. You can get there all year and in the winter it is shockingly cheap to get here. I overheard a man from Manchester who said he got a spur-of-the-moment deal on Friday night for an early flight the next day for £8!

If you are thinking of coming then stay a few days and move on – you can get a train to Seville, go to Cordoba or go along the coast to more up-market places like Marbella. I chose to go to Nerja next.