Episode 30: On Location in Green Spain—Europe’s Next Great Expat Eden

Lifestyle Editor Sean Keenan joins the podcast from Bilbao, Spain, on-location as he researches his next feature story for International Living magazine about an off-the-beaten-path area of Europe that’s ripe for the picking.

Green Spain... Just 100 miles north of Portugal, the stretch of coast between the Basque city of Bilbao in the east, and the Belle Epoque resort of Ribadesella in the west, is a breath-taking area of lush woodland, high mountain peaks, genteel fishing villages, hidden sea coves, and sophisticated international cities.

It’s a region that escapes the ferocious heat of Spain’s interior, occupying a microclimate that’s a breath of fresh air for travelers and expats who are more interested in comfortable temperatures than tropical heat. It’s the perfect place for anyone who craves mild temperatures and four defined seasons. Count on summers that kick off in late April, peak in August, and then cool down to a misty, picturesque Fall in late September. Summer heat rarely peaks above 85 F, while crisp winter mornings see frost in the lowlands, but rarely dip below freezing for long.

In terms of cuisine, Green Spain considers itself to be the epicenter of the best cooking in the country, with a tradition of excellent cool-water seafood from local fishing ports as well as the best dairy and produce from the deep, fertile soil of the region. Hearty bean-based dishes represent the mountain portion of Green Spain, and the preferred local beverage—alcoholic cider—is another of the region’s specialties that adds a distinct sense of place to the dining experience.

Tiny mountain villages nestled into remote valleys, thriving seaports, sophisticated cities, rolling farmland, craggy peaks, a vast and wild coastline…Green Spain is rich with variety. Despite its relatively small size, the region probably offers more to the prospective expat than the rest of Spain combined. And yet, it’s overlooked. That’s partly because it’s been overshadowed by its close neighbor, Portugal. And while Portugal has much to offer, lately, it's been getting almost too popular. Accommodation scarcity in Portugal is driving prices skyward, particularly in sought-after destinations like the Algarve, Lisbon, or Porto.

Green Spain, though, offers almost exactly the same expat experience as Portugal, along with a landscape that’s more dramatic, a cost of living that is arguably lower, and property prices that need to be seen to be believed. A four-bedroom apartment in one of the hippest neighborhoods of central Bilbao for less than $160,000? You bet!

With bustling oceanside cities such as Santander, Bilbao, and Gijon; vast stretches of spectacular coastline; dramatic mountain scenery, and a near-undiscovered selection of precious historic villages, it can’t be long before Green Spain starts to generate a buzz among prospective expats. Be among the first of them by tuning in to Sean’s report in this week’s episode of Bigger Better World.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform: https://lovethepodcast.com/internationalliving.

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Chapters

• 2:24 What Exactly is Green Spain?
• 6:04 Sophisticated City Life in Bilbao
• 10:11 Local Identity, Language, and Life in the Mountains
• 14:59 Mountains and Beaches Within Half an Hour
• 18:54 Real Estate Prices Trapped in the Past
• 21:24 A Large Choice of Hospitals and Healthcare
• 25:30 Ribadesella: ‘Like A Smaller San Sebastian’
• 29:19 English-Speaking Hospitality, and Four-Season Living
• 34:12 ‘Not Really the Typical Expat Haven’

Transcript

Jim Santos 00:09 

Hello and welcome to Bigger, Better World. You know, in our intro, we promise you a look at some of the undiscovered places around the globe. And today we're going to live up to that promise with a visit to Spain. 

Now, Spain has long been a popular expat location, ranking number six this year in the International Living Global Retirement Index. However, most of the attention is generally on the southern coast of Spain, the Costa del Sol. We are going to instead be discussing the northern coastal region along the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean, known as Green Spain because of its lush and verdant scenery. International Living lifestyle editor Sean Keenan, an old friend of the podcast, has been exploring this area for the past week and is here to talk to us today from a hotel in Bilbao, Spain. 

Hey, Sean. Welcome back to a Bigger, Better World.

Sean Keenan 01:29 

Great to be back again.

Jim Santos 01:31 

The last time we spoke to you, you had just returned from an editorial trip to the Greek islands and now here you are, actually still on an editorial trip somewhere in Spain.

Sean Keenan 01:42 

Well, it's not the same editorial trip. I did get home and unpack my bags, wash my clothes and repack them, but it's only just been a month since I was in Greece and now here I am, back in Northern Spain. So no arguments from me. I love going on the trips. It's the highlight of the job for me.

Jim Santos 02:02 

Did you ever get the feeling they just don't want you around the office?

Sean Keenan 02:05 

Yeah, well, I've tried very hard to make myself unpopular in the office!

Jim Santos 02:09 

So when most people think about Spain, especially as a destination, they're thinking about the Costa del Sol, I guess, which is mostly the southern coast of Spain. But you're not in that. You're in a road less traveled in Spain at the moment, aren't you?

Sean Keenan 02:24 

Absolutely. And it's interesting to come almost full circle for me because my very first editorial trip for international living was to the Costa Blanca on the southeast coast of Spain, which, again, is another place that is very well associated with the whole expat ideal and particularly with Northern European and British travelers who have been going to those places to winter out or to snowbird their way out of the winter by going down to those places. 

That's the really established part of Spain from the point of view of expat life. But what I've done is I've come to the complete opposite coast. I'm up on the north coast, on the Atlantic coast, and it's a very different Spain. A lot of people, the tourist offices or the tourist industry in Spain refer to it using the word green or the phrase ‘Green Spain’. And when come here, you can really tell why that's the case because there is nowhere—and I'm a man that comes from Ireland—but there is nowhere I can think of that is greener than green Spain.

Jim Santos 03: 27 

Of course, you're there at a wonderful time of the year too, to be enjoying the greenness.

Sean Keenan 03:32 

Yeah, absolutely. It's late spring here. It's just starting to feel a little bit summery. I was down at the beach a couple of times on this trip and you're starting to see the crowds getting to the beach, people going for the day out with the temperatures starting to get up into the low 80s F right now. So it's starting to feel more spring like, more summer like. 

But yeah, it's still, you can still catch that, like, really fresh new green leaves on the trees and a lot of deciduous forest up in this part of the world. I kind of get a little bit nerdy about trees, species and stuff like that because I feel it's a really good way of getting a handle on what the climate is of a place. So when you're traveling around these parts, there's a lot of broad leaf deciduous—you've got beech trees, you've got chestnut trees, you've got a lot of ash trees, which are interesting. And ash trees generally need a little bit of a winter. 

And also if you see the vegetation here, there's a huge amount of apple trees. In fact, in Cantabria and Asturias, kind of west of where I am right now in Bilbao, the local drink, the traditional drink here is cider, which is an alcoholic cider that they make with the local apples.

So, it's not really wine country. It's a little bit cooler than wine country, climate-wise. I think I would liken it to somewhere like maybe Oregon, northern California. Not quite as wet or as cold as Washington State, but it's got that sort of four seasons, but four very defined and dependable seasons. 

I did live actually in the Basque Country. I'm right in there at the moment. I'm in the Basque Country section. I did spend three years of my life living and teaching in the Basque Country. And I do think it's got one of the nicest… for me personally, it's got the nicest climate of anywhere I've been because it doesn't really go much above 85 F in the summer and it doesn't really get below freezing much in winter either. It's got a beautiful fall because of all those deciduous trees. It's got a real sort of Vermont style fall, all those lovely russet red colors and ochres and so on when the trees, when the leaves start to change. And then it's got a really decent defined summer. June, July, August here, you're looking at 80s. Temperatures in the 80s pretty much every day. And then you've got the beaches that go with that.

Jim Santos 05:54 

I was going to ask you if this was anywhere near the Basque region. So you're up near the Bay of Biscay and not too far from the French border.

Sean Keenan 06:04 

Absolutely. On the Bay of Biscay? Yeah, certainly I am. Right now I'm in Bilbao City, which is the Basque Country, so it's part of the Basque region. It's on the very western edge of the Basque Country region, which, as you say, goes all the way over France, maybe 100 miles to my east. So a lot of people would consider going to San Sebastian as the main city that they would know of this region. I do understand that San Sebastian is a very beautiful city, but I don't feel it's got as much of a real city feel as Bilbao does. 

Bilbao has slightly more population. If you were to take the whole Bilbao metropolitan region, you've got a population of about half a million people. So it gets that real proper city vibe. You've got a big main street with all those high street stores on them, so you recognize all those high street store names and the designer names. But it's also got the little Casco Viejo, which is the old town area, and that's all the old little houses, the little narrow streets, the cobblestone alleys and all that sort stuff.

Then you've got a big river that runs down the center of the city and it brings you to the financial district and the one building that everybody knows and associates with Bilbao, which is the Guggenheim Museum; the Frank Gehry big titanium building. Frank Gehry is a Dutch, what do we call it? Architect. Dutch architect who built this in 1993. And it really revitalized Bilbao because Bilbao, until that point, in the 1970s, 1980s, was a very derelict, down on its luck sort of industrial port and it was really kind of almost going into decline. And then boom, this one big, one big effort from the Bilbao council to bring one big thing to the city really revitalized. 

It did work and a lot of people came to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim Museum and from there on just started to discover how great this city is. And it's still in a revitalization sort of trajectory. I'm staying right now at the moment in an area of town called San Francisco. It's not obviously not the San Francisco in California, but it's the San Francisco barrio or area of town, which, even in the 1990s when I lived nearby, the San Francisco area was a bit edgy.

It was kind of the red light district, kind of the crime district. Whereas now it's kind of become a family, very family community, sort of neighborhood. And I love it because it's very, very central in the middle of the city almost perfectly, exactly in the geographical middle of the city, center of the city. But it's no longer edgy and it's kind of a new growing area. It's very multi-ethnic, it's very young, it's very vibrant. And also you've got this situation where you sit down and watch people in the cafe. People come to a cafe and sit down and nod each other in greeting because they might not know each other's names, but they kind of recognize each other's faces, that sort of a way. So it's a part of the city and I enjoy it.

Jim Santos 09:20 

I’ve always been kind of interested in that area because of the Basque region. I don't know how many people know much about the Basque people, but the Basque language is not really related to many of the other languages in the area.

Sean Keenan 09:35 

Not at all.

Jim Santos 09:36 

The Basque people are kind of a people apart. They never really identified with France or Spain.

Sean Keenan 09:41 

No. They would say that genetically that they are people apart as well.

Jim Santos 09:50 

Yeah. I have read the theory that they are descended from the Neanderthal.

Sean Keenan 09:54 

Exactly. And more directly.

Jim Santos 09:56 

Yeah. So the area always kind of has a reputation of being almost a land that's out of time or out of sync with anything else. Did you notice that in any of the small villages? I understand you were in some towns that just had like 20 or 30 people in them.

Sean Keenan 10:11 

It certainly is in the villages. Yeah. There's a very strong sense of Basque identity in the Basque villages. Including the language? Including everything. Including even the way that the Basques dress, for example. It's modern clothes. It's not like they're in traditional clothing or anything. But there is a certain… you can identify a Basque just basically by looking at them because they have their own fashions, right down to haircuts and things like that. And then, of course, they speak their own language too. 

But that village in which I went to with the 34 people, that's a very interesting place, but that wasn't in the Basque Country. That was in an Asturias province. The little village is called Bulnes, which you'll find in the Picos, the Picos de Europa National Park, which is an autonomous region, which is a little bit further to the west. And the wonderful thing about that village is that it has no road access. So you can’t actually drive a car up there or a truck.

Jim Santos 11:20 

Yeah, you can't get there from here.

Sean Keenan 11:22 

So to say, well, you've got two ways of getting there. Until about 20 years ago, you only had one way of getting there, which you had to actually get your boots on. You had to walk up the path. It's a good solid two or three hours’ worth of hiking to get there. Now, sometime in the 1990s, the people of Bulnes just petitioned their local government and said, look, while it's lovely living up here and being isolated and so on, you know, we would like to have some sort of emergency access if we need to get you know, if we need emergency access to hospitals or whatever. Or, you know, we don't want to get snowed in for months at a time. So a funicular was built. 

So there's a funicular railway goes up and down to that little village now but the magic of the place is that the last scheduled service of the day finishes at six in the evening. So if you're up there after six in the evening, there's no more contact. And it's just the most wonderful, peaceful, tranquil place to be. I think there's one hotel, there's a hostel or a couple of bars.

The economy there is still very much farming, but they do have a couple of concessions to tourism and it's great. It's a lovely, lovely place. I've spent one of the nicest evenings, nights I've spent anywhere in the world up there. Just the sounds of all sheep, sheep with bells on, so you could hear this ting dong tink donk in the background of when the sheep move and the rest of it is just birdsong. That is literally all you can hear. It's quite charming.

Jim Santos 13:03 

I understand you did some hiking in the Picos de Europa.

Sean Keenan 13:07 

Yeah, I did some hiking just to get up to Bulnes in the first place. But I did a little bit of hiking around when I was there too, because there are some wonderful, wonderful things to see there. There's one particular peak called Naranjo, which is a 600-meter sheer wall of limestone which just juts completely out of the ground. It almost looks like the tip of a chisel just sticking out of the ground. Now, I didn't try and climb it, I had a good look at it, but I didn't try and climb it. I just did a circular hike really, just to have a look for a couple of hours just on the plateau up there to see what I could see. 

Those mountains are good high mountains. They're 10,000ft mountains, which is that's not special in itself, but what's special about them is that they are 15 miles from the ocean and it's an incredibly compact, incredibly small mountain range which just sweeps, almost sweeps so steeply right down to the sea. And when you get to a little town like Ribadesella or Llanes, both two little coastal towns, little port coastal towns, but to be at the sea and look up at these mountains, which…even I was there in late May and during the night there was snow.

So to look up at snowcapped mountains from the beach and know that you can be there within a half hour's drive. It's really quite rare. You don't find that in too many places in the world. I'm always attracted to places where you can have that mountain/beach dichotomy really, really quickly.

Jim Santos 14:52 

Yeah, the big island of Hawaii is the only one I can think of where you can literally drive from the beach up to the snow.

Sean Keenan 14:59 

Up to snow, yeah. Let's see. Let me think. If I can think of any more you could do. So maybe in the French Basque Country, you could get into Pyrenees pretty quick, but not within half an hour. And I'm sure there are other places in Chile or places like that, but generally speaking, to have that in Europe here in a really kind of lovely, beautifully developed part of Europe with a lot of population, it's a great combination. 

So I was looking at it and I was thinking in terms of writing an article later on in the month to go into the magazine and thinking, well, look, you've got your classic here because you've got beaches, mountains, and a number of cities. But Bilbao being the one that I'm quite attracted to and I'm sitting in at the moment. Santander is also a city on the Cantabrian coast. It's a little west of here as well. And it's another good city. It's got a lovely, lovely beach. The city itself is a little industrial and largely residential, so I don't think it's as nice a city as Bilbao is, but it certainly has its town beach. 

Santander has a town beach called El Sardinero. Sardine beach. Basically, it's where the sardine boats used to get launched. So, yeah, I mean, for a town beach and Santander and then right close to the mountains as well, that's another lovely little option. And I think what largely comes to me as I travel around this part of the world is that it's very overlooked, very forgotten. 

I mean, this is probably the first time, certainly in my time with International Living, that the magazine is going to be covering this area in any great depth. I don't really think it's been discovered by anything much more than Spanish tourists. People from Madrid. And as soon as the kids get off school in July, they head straight up to the coast and will very often come to Santander, usually drive to Santander City and then move off to some of the little towns up on the beach. Towns close to Santander. And Spanish tourists have been doing that for decades, but there aren't really that many people from outside of Spain who even think about coming here.

It's odd because the Santiago de Compostela pilgrim trail, which is a really big event, or it's a big draw, it's a big tourism draw to the region. But people will walk right past all these towns and all these cities, but never really stop in them for very long. And I think it's very overlooked. 

And I think that's wonderful from our point of view because I see, for example, a lot of International Living subscribers are very interested in retiring or moving or spending a lot of time in Portugal, for example, at the moment. It seems to be very fashionable at the moment, very popular at the moment to consider Portugal as a place to go. And I don't disagree with that. I love Portugal. I think it's a wonderful place. But walking around here, I see nothing that Portugal has that the northern Spain coast doesn't have either. And the prices, to me, seem pretty similar. 

The countryside looks very like northern Spain sorry, like northern Portugal. And in many cases, I think it's a little bit more spectacular here because of those mountains that I just mentioned, the Picos de Europa. And to have that drama, to have that physical drama of big, craggy, jagged mountains coming right down to the sea, you just don't get that in Portugal. I think that's an advantage here.

Jim Santos 18:47 

Have you had a chance to be able to price any of the real estate in the area or get an idea of what long term rentals are?

Sean Keenan 18:54 

I did just a moment ago. And just about 10 minutes ago, I put a Facebook post on the VIP Facebook group, International Living Facebook, of a place right here in San Francisco, right here on San Francisco Street itself. And it was a four-bed, four-bedroom apartment for €149,000. Which boggled my mind, really, because to be in such a great city, such a really incredible, international, interesting, vibrant city, and to be in what I consider to be one of the most up and coming neighborhoods within that city for $150,000… Maybe a little more than that, depending on when you're making the conversion, what the rate is between the two currencies. But let's call it somewhere between $150,000 and $155,000. I think that's an absolute steal. I think that's a wonderful bargain. There are places for less. I've seen places on realtors’ window boards for anything as low as $80,000. But that's not here in the city of Bilbao. That's over in the countryside of Asturias. Asturias is affordable, very affordable. It's got similar prices, property prices as Portugal. And when I say Portugal, I don't mean the Algarve parts, or I don't mean Lisbon or Porto, I mean the countryside, the rural parts of Portugal too.

So very surprisingly low prices. When I lived here back in the 1990s, Bilbao and the Basque Country and San Sebastian were considered to be very expensive, comparatively expensive in in Spanish terms. Apartments in that in those days were going for $150,000 to $180,000 for a three-bedroom apartment, which was unbelievable in a Spanish context at the time. But the interesting thing for me is that this is 20 years further on now, and the prices don't seem to have moved. They have moved in the rest of Spain. The rest of Spain has come up to those prices. But the prices here in the vast country seem to have just remained stable and are the same as they were 20 years ago.

Jim Santos 21:18 

And in a city the size of Bilbao, I'd assume there's a few hospitals as well.

Sean Keenan 21:24 

Certainly is, yeah. There's a great big hospital. The largest hospital is in a part of town called San Mames. San Mames is to the northern end of the city, and that's really where all the sort of administrative stuff goes on. So it's kind of a part of the city where the conference centers are, and the big soccer stadium is there, and the big hospital is there as well. Spain in general does a lot of smaller regional hospitals. It doesn't tend to go for those big, huge ones, but the cities do those. 

Usually in the bigger cities, like Bilbao, you'll usually find a hub hospital for all the larger, more complicated procedures, and they'll have the more specialists and so on. Whereas, for example, I think it was about ten years ago, I broke my leg in the the region of Madrid where I was living, out northwest of Madrid. And I got all the surgery done on that within my local hospital, which was not actually a Madrid city at all. It was a small town called Escorial, and it was a very small hospital, really. Only three floors, one single building, only really the size of a large apartment building.

But I got all my work done there. I think if I had had anything more complicated, anything more complex, if there had been complications, I would have been referred to the larger hospital in the in northwest Madrid area, which is in a town called Majadahonda. So you do find that the system here just will essentially try and get you to your smallest, most local hospital for any treatments. Particularly outpatient treatments will happen in the smaller places.

Jim Santos 23:16 

Sure.

Sean Keenan 23:16 

And then there are the big hospitals. I'm talking about the national healthcare system here. The national socialized healthcare system. The private hospitals will nearly always be in the bigger cities, but they will be smaller hospitals. And quite often the same happens if you do have a more complicated procedure or you need a more specialized specialist, you may very well end up in one of those larger hospitals anyway, getting private care, but at a public hospital.

Jim Santos 23:51 

So, looking at a map here there's also an international airport in Bilbao. So even though it is a kind of remote region, you're not really cut off there either.

Sean Keenan 24:00 

Absolutely not. No. In fact, I'm flying out of there tomorrow and I will be flying back to Dublin from Bilbao, two flights a day to Ireland. There's also an international airport in Santander. Santander City has got also international flights because that was one of my options as well. So Bilbao Airport is great because it's quite close to the center of the city. You can get there on the bus for €3, you can get out to the airport. It takes about 20 minutes from the city. 

That's really useful because there are some cities where the airports are by name only. If you're flying to Paris, for example, and you fly into Charles de Gaulle, the name Paris is there. But to get from Charles de Gaulle airport into Paris city center, it's 45 minutes minimum on a train. Long time. And the London airports as well, for example, London Heathrow to London center, again, 40 minutes on a train. A lot of the European airports are a little bit tricky like that, but Bilbo isn't. You're directly into the city center very quickly, very conveniently.

Jim Santos 25:15 

People are interested in more of a smaller beach like community. I see in your itinerary that you were also planning on stopping by Ribadesella and Santillana del Mar. What did you think of those regions?

Sean Keenan 25:30 

Santillana del Mar is interesting because they say that there are three lies in Santillana del Mar. The three lies are that santi means saint in the local dialect. There's no saint there. Llana means flat plain. And it's not a flat plain because it's all quite hilly. And del Mar means at the seaside, and it's not at the seaside. Santillana del Mar is not actually any of the things. 

Santillana del Mar is a delightful little town. It's super medieval. It's just all tiny little cobblestone alleys, beautiful 16th, 17th century stone townhouses. It's spectacular, but it's beautifully small and compact. You can walk around the whole of the town in half an hour. It's really worth seeing. However, it isn't a beach town, but Ribadesella certainly is a beach town. And Ribadesella, I think, is one of the nicest beach towns around. I feel it's like a very much smaller San Sebastian, if that means anything to you. 

If that doesn't mean anything to you, what I mean by that is you have a lovely old town section, 18th century old town, which then you just cross over a bridge, a little small walk, and you're on a lovely crescent beach, this lovely crescent surf beach, sandy beach with mountains you can see from the beach.

Again, that's the place I was referring to when I was talking about Asturias and the ability to just look up from the sand of the beach up at the peaks of the high mountains right behind you. And Ribadesella is, again, it's a lovely, very quaint old town area with lots of outdoor restaurants and loads of little places. And what it's associated with is cider. So the restaurants quite often are specifically what they call sidrerias, which just basically means that they will sell you a bottle of cider, local cider, to go with your meal there. 

They're not wine drinking people traditionally, they're cider drinking people. And they have a whole cuisine built around the idea of this cider. And they have a very special way of pouring the cider, because it's not naturally very bubbly. So to counteract that, there's a sort of a special way of pouring into sort of a fairly wide tumbler glass. And you're supposed to pour… the people who know how to do it, you're supposed to pour the cider out of the bottle from over your head. You're supposed to lift the bottle over your head and pour it down into the glass without spilling it all over the place. And that aerates the cider then and gives it a bit of a bit of a bit of a bubble, bit of a head. 

Needless to say, those of us who weren't brought up to that end up spilling it all over the floor, which gets embarrassing. So they have come up with a couple of little tricks. Sometimes you can go to a place and they'll bring you a special little pump machine that you can put your bottle of cider into and you can pump it into your glass. 

Jim Santos 28:50 

A lot more controlled circumstances for those who are less adventurous.

Sean Keenan 28:54 

You could be as adventurous as you like, but it's down to your dexterity. I'm certainly adventurous, but I still have it all over the floor!

Jim Santos 29:02 

So this sounds like a really beautiful area with a lot of possibilities, but as you say, that it hasn't really been discovered by, certainly not by North American expats. Any European expats? Did you notice any prevalence of people from, like, France or England or Ireland there?

Sean Keenan 29:19 

Not especially. I mean, you hear the voices, you can hear people from different places. You can hear French people speaking. Quite often when you're sitting in a cafe or somewhere like that, you will hear French people and you quite often hear British people too. As, like I said, the Camino de Santiago passes through a lot of these small towns. So you do get tourism there and you get year-round tourism. 

Somewhere like Llanes, which I just mentioned fleetingly, it's a little like Ribadesella. It's an old fishing town which developed into a bit of a tourist hub as well. So it's not like you'll be completely unable to speak to people in English. Certainly within the hospitality sector, you can speak English to anyone who's pretty much serving. You will be able to talk to you about your order and explain to you what it is that you might want to eat from the menu or so on. 

There isn't even really a great number of European expats that I've managed to come across. I talked to one British man, Taylor Firth, who is living in close to close to Santander with his Cuban wife. I visited his home, which was a bit of a bargain. Maybe five minutes’ drive from the beach, in a gated community and a standalone house, four bedrooms, large garden all the way around it, two stories, garage which he's converted into a studio for himself.

And he was telling me that they paid $220,000 euros for that. That's just two years ago that they paid for that. And also he was telling me actually that his heating costs for the whole of the year came to €1,100 for the whole winter on a home of that size. I think it's pretty impressive actually.

Jim Santos 31:25 

I was going to ask about that, speaking of heating costs, because I assume in that region you do have four seasons through the year.

Sean Keenan 31:32 

You certainly do. And you will have to heat your home here. As I say, that's the best steer I have on that is that he was telling me that his quite large, quite open home, a standalone home, not an apartment, an actual standalone house with the four bedrooms, the two stories and then the converted garage at the back. €1100 for oil-based heating, oil fired heating. So €1,100, not bad.

Jim Santos 32:06 

It's just interesting the number of expats I know who have moved to warm beaches for year round good weather, how often after a few years they tell me how much they missed the change of the seasons. So it seems like an area where you have the beach, you also have the mountains and you also have the changes in the season so you can watch everything green up and become beautiful every spring.

Sean Keenan 32:31 

Yeah, and become beautiful every fall as well. I would really tell anybody considering coming to these parts of the world not to miss the fall because it is spectacular. It really is. There's a feel to it because the air gets a little bit chill but there's still strong sunshine during the day so you can get the heat on your back. If you get the right day, you get the heat on your back, but you get a little chilled in the air. And then all across the mountains, where you see the leaves turning and all that beautiful color in the leaves. But then you'll see a little farmhouse with just a little trail of blue gray smoke just coming from the fireplace up into the air. 

It's a very evocative sight but it's very typical of these places and it is very beautiful. I do think that the idea of four seasons is really starting to gain popularity again. Certainly amongst International Living subscribers. We do get mailbag queries and probably more than I ever remember saying look, where could it go that's actually got four seasons? Not everybody is looking for that tropical, year-round gets light at 06:00 in the morning and gets dark at 6:00 in the evening and every day is the same…Not everybody's looking for that. 

I could certainly… you know, I like it. I like it to visit, but the passing of time, the passing of seasons, the natural rhythm of life, too, and I think we all appreciate that, too. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of people do appreciate that, too. And certainly this is one of the best places I can think of to experience it.

Jim Santos 34:12 

Well, we've been talking with Sean Keenan, the lifestyle editor of International Living magazine, currently exploring an area of northern Spain that's largely been overlooked by expats. If you're the adventurous sort or the kind of person who is interested in exploring areas or living someplace where it is not really the typical expat haven, you'd be well to look for these articles and upcoming editions of International Living magazine. 

Sean, thanks for sharing with us and have a safe trip home.

Sean Keenan 34:42 

Thank you, Jim, I certainly will. And thanks for having me on the show again. It's been great.

Jim Santos 34:56 

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Thanks again for joining us on Bigger, Better World. I'm Jim Santos for International Living. I'll see you next time, and until then, remember, there's a Bigger, Better World just waiting.