Part 2: Our choice for the Mazarrón Country Club.
Once you have made the decision for a second home in Spain, you must decide where to look. First you have to think about what kind of environment you want. Are you out of the hustle and bustle, of seeing and being seen and can’t you go without boulevards, lounge bars and trendy nightclubs or are you looking for peace and space? We are more for peace and space and because we also want to be able to flee our little country in the winter period, you will soon end up at the Costa Blanca and more southerly. Since we as Dutch, we also pay a little attention to the prices, the solution was somewhere in the middle: the Costa Calida. A good climate with attractive house prices.
Still not very specific. Will it then be a finca, an urbanization or rather a spot on one of the many golf courses? On Google Maps and on the home sites, much looked very attractive. After a selection of options, then continue to view on the real location. Then you do get into the harsh reality: ten years ago, project developers saw many opportunities to talk to purchasers into a local dream house. The dream of living on the golf course in particular, was apparently very tempting. Some are reasonably finished (but not everything sold), others consisting of nothing more than the golf course, the road network of the neighborhoods and some houses. In the meantime, financially a lot better in Spain, so the Spanish banks are slowly bringing the houses and apartments that were built ten years ago slowly at the market as brand new. But our taste has changed. So the new or restarted project developers are now building modern villas everywhere. Looking nice on the pictures, but those nice pictures don’t show that they are build 20 in a row, with only a meter in between them. Your detached villa is nothing more than a terraced house in a full up neighborhood.
We arrived at Mazarrón Country Club. A glance at the entrance driveway immediately gives you a different feeling: wide roads, pavements everywhere, spacious, quiet and above all neat. Nothing compared to everything else we’ve seen. In short, it felt most at home of everything we had seen. Now, a few months later, the Mazarron Country Club (MCC) appears to be the ideal place for us, partly due to its location in the area. You get quite a few extras for free:
- MCC has a lot of space around it. Within five minutes you are on a mountain path or on the old railway line through nature. It has now become a hiking and mountain bike trail of more than 25 kilometers.
- It is less than a 15-minute drive to the sea at Puerto de Mazarrón or Bolnuevo. With endless good beaches you have plenty of choice. There is so much beach that they have even made pieces of dog beach.
- Have a relaxed lunch on Sunday (and all other days) at your favorite beach bar.
- The new highways are perfect.
- Puerto de Mazarrón and Bolnuevo are not really picturesque Spanish villages. Inhabitants from Madrid often come here to celebrate their weekends and holidays. That is why it is lively enough with many of its own residents so that it does not become a zombie village in the winter. But also a place where we have not yet come across a typical tourist shop.
- In addition to the Lidl XXL and Aldi there is an abundance of supermarkets and other nice shops in the area. So much that you sometimes wonder what they can consist of. What is striking is that there is a Chinese bazar everywhere.
- Within 30-40 minutes you are in the middle of a big city like Murcia, you are eating Swedish meatballs in the Ikea, or you are in the rough nature of the Sierra Nevada. Okay, for downhill skiing you have to drive 350 kilometers to the Sierra Nevada.