About Bitten by Spain

In search of la buena vida and sunnier climes, Deborah Fletcher and her husband John came to be the proud owners of a large and extremely beautiful piece of land in a river valley in the region of Murcia, southern Spain. There, with an ever-increasing menagerie of dogs, cats and birds, not to mention an awful lot of spiders, they lived between a static caravan and a huge old barn as they battled perpetually – with the elements, the wildlife, the authorities and cultural differences – to build their dream home from a pile of stones.

Bitten by Spain began as a series of newsy emails to friends and family in the UK and developed into this intimate, warts-and-all – and often hilarious – take on Spanish rural life and what it’s like learning to live in a finca en el campo in southern Spain.

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About the Author, Deborah Fletcher

In summary, I suppose I must admit that I am someone who never really had much of a clue about what it is I wanted in life, and so I lurch clumsily through it along a haphazard path in the blind faith that it’ll all be fine in the end!

From entering university in 1977 to study pharmacy and then changing my mind, and the course of study to biology, after a year; to teaching for eight years in FE (further education) colleges and then completely retraining in accountancy and taxation; to running my own accountancy practice for ten years and then selling the whole shooting match to retrain in professional interior design; to living my whole life in England working with papers and rules and then moving to Spain and finding my own brand of anarchy.

All experiences make us what we are. I am clearly a somewhat random cocktail, then!

But I can say truthfully that I have always given everything my best shot, that the milestones in my life are things of which I am proud (my husband, my son, my friends, my assorted ragbag of diverse achievements, my honesty, my creeds), and that I wouldn’t, in retrospect, change a damn thing. And at twenty years of age, I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t have wanted to grow my own organic produce, keep hens, write a book, make crystal jewellery and run a chaotic menagerie … but here I am after all, as happy as a rotund pink animal in the dubious brown stuff.

Debbie Fletcher