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.