Hunting for houses in Jerez

We’re walking down Long Street in the centre of Jerez on our way to inspect a house for sale and we notice a young woman struggling to get a bike through the doorway to an apartment complex. Jess skipped over to lend a hand. Honestly, watching the two of them struggle was painful; the doors in Jerez are really heavy (and spring-loaded) and the bike was one of those giant electric thingys complete with saddlebags and a baby seat. But they got it inside eventually.

It turns out that the bike’s rider spoke perfect English and we struck up a conversation. An architect from an old Jerez family, Marta is freshly back from six years working in Switzerland, with her husband (also an architect) and their two young kids. She plans to set up a consultancy, helping immigrants and locals alike to navigate the tangled miasma that is building renovation in Spain.

Ah, buried the lede again. We’re house hunting. We’ve only been in Jerez for six months but already we can tell it’s the place for us. It’s the right size (180,000 people), 100 per cent walkable, beautiful, friendly. Outside of festival weekends it’s quiet, it being emminently possible to snag a seat at your pick of bars whenever you want without having to poke a tourist in the eye with a stick. Inside of festival weekends it’s anything but quiet – but it’s a fascinating and passionate form of gypsy disquiet that, if it doesn’t actually boil your blood, will at least give it a gentle poaching. Flamenco is soul-shaking.

Plus, I can’t see myself living anywhere else because nowhere else has sherry, which is the alcohol equivalent of a galloping horse.

Bumping into Marta has turned out to be a remarkable stroke of luck. She knows what it’s like, moving to a foreign city and not knowing anyone. I’m keen to help her get her business going and she’s willing to use us as guinea pigs to test how said business might operate. It’s a match made in Pedro Ximénez.

To date, our house inspections have happened with a tentative bent because we don’t really know what we’re looking at. In Australia you can get a fair idea of what’s good or bad about a place with a quick look at the switchboard and the hot water cylinder. Insulated? Double glazed? Brick or weatherboard? We’re all experts.

So … what do you look for in a 200-year-old converted stone palace with communal wiring and plumbing? I don’t even know what questions to ask. Even if I did, mostly I’d have to do it with mime.

Marta does know what questions to ask, and as a professional in the industry with a family history in Jerez, she gets answers. Already she’s gotten us to the pointy end of a couple of (as yet unconcluded) negotiations that we never would have if left to our own devices. Spanish people love to talk – usually all at the same time – and we watched in awe as Marta extracted information about the air-conditioning, plumbing, electrics, the owner’s shoe preferences, what’s with kids these days and all the junk food they eat, and something about a herring?

She has myriad contacts in the renovation industry and knows to the euro how much a new shower and a skylight cost. It means we can include places in need of minor renovation on our search list, where before we’d have been too scared to take on the renovation rumble.

Also she’s offered to lend me her bike.