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Some 4 years ago, Will, my better half, and I decided we wanted to buy a place abroad. At this point our budget was quite tiny and so off we went to Italy with some friends to see what was available. The idea at this stage was that maybe we would buy a place together - silly idea - but on our first trip to Puglia we saw nothing that hit the spot. We did however fall in love with Ostuni, a marvellous white town sitting on a hilltop and although nothing came of the trip, Ostuni is still a place that I would love to return to and would recommend it especially to the foodies amongst us. We returned a few months later with our younger daughter and were driven around by a so called expert who showed us quite the most unattractive building I have ever seen. He kept on telling us that he was an expert but somehow managed to take us on a two day road trip from A to B to A and then back to B. In other words we spent 2 days in his Alpha feeling car sick whilst he drove and breakneck speed talking to 'his men' on the phone.

Our next preferred destination was southern France and luckily for us we had some friends who had recently moved to a place near Quillan so we combined a visit to see them and some more house hunting. France for me was more comfortable as I can speak a bit of French. We loved the area, found the people friendly and the food rather good too but we just couldn't find the right sort of house. You see we wanted something that was in a village, that needed a bit of work doing to it, that was spacious enough for us to take friends and family away, that was not too far from an airport to enable us to make use of it at weekends but that also had some outside space. It would appear form what we learned that village houses ( in that part of France anyway), don't have much of a garden.

It just so happened that one of our oldest friends had moved from Portugal to Spain and asked us to pay her a visit. Spain was out as far as we were concerned; the image of crowded beaches had tainted its appeal. She and her partner however lived in Extremadura in central southern Spain. They had bought a large plot of land, had built a barn and then a three bedroom house in the middle of nowhere and were running it as a B&B/ barn rental business.

We fell in love. Extremadura is wild, non touristy and very, very Spanish. Whilst there we had very hot sun, rain and the most amazing thunder and lightning. It made the rather long flight and two and a half hour drive seem worthwhile. After a week with them we bought a finca!!