So confused about where to move...can you help? - Page 2

I have a same problem except find the school for children. We don't know which area we should decide to move. We agreed about Casas Manuel comment, They seems very friendly and helpful. Although it's their business earn for living, I sure they also like to helping people. 

The other issues is medication or health insurance. My husband over 65 and I am only 53. 

Hi, as you said in your original post, location and requirements are very much a personal choice and actually, i am completely aligned with your own criteria (except we are just retired) and this year we have been looking in the areas around Guardamar, Rojales, Quesada and before that in Santa Pola.

Santa Pola is a good sized lovely Spanish seaside/fishing town only 15 mins from Alicante airport, it has some small urbanisations, mostly Spanish owned and mostly Spanish holiday homes and a variety of typical Spanish apartments and 2 story bungalows. We fell in love with it as the people are fantastic and the beaches are just outstanding but we want a detached villa style house and Santa Pola doesn't really have many of those types of properties, hence our search moved south towards Guardama etc.

It doesn't have any restaurants that do 'english breakfasts' and as far as I know, only one Irish bar. You won't hear much english spoken in Santa  Pola although you do get some British visitors in the summer and there is a small expat population in Santa Pola yet it's only 25 mins from Elche city (train station, bus station, large teaching hospital etc), 15 mins from the Urb of Gran Alacant, 15 mins from La Marina urb and 35 mins from Quesada/rojales.

However, that wasn't the main point of my post response...it was actually to say...stay grounded in your search, take breaks from constant research and don't let the process overtake you, we found it overtook our life for months and became counter productive in the end. We were in Spain for 10 weeks this year looking etc. we had to learn to maintain our perspective.

We hope to sell our house in the spring and move over from UK in summer 2019 and rent for a while whilst we look around to buy in the Guardamar area.

Good luck. Paul.

As everyone notes, areas of choice are highly personal and what's perfect for one person is hell for another. Bear in mind that your criteria can change over time so my advice is to steer a middle course and look for areas that might meet changing circumstances. Don't let "perfect for now" cloud your decision of "good for the future" if you get my drift. It's still very much a buyer's market and the transaction costs are high so you don't want to buy something now and have trouble trying to sell it in a few years if your situation changes. Good luck with everything. 

El Verger is an excellant starting point very nice village, Els Poblets is a little smaller but still has all shops banks supermarkets you would want and both are open all year, with a very good sunday market. A short drive is a large shopping mall just outside Ondara then you are near the historic town of Denia a great place to eat and shop, then down to Javea.

whatever location you choose always go to the beach, if there are lots of closed shops then they rely on summer trade and in my view best to avoid.

Hope this helps