Some of my best thinking happens in transit.
In the summer of 2024 I tagged a solo hiking trip in the Alps onto our annual family visit to my partner’s parents in the South of France. Four days in the mountains north of Milan with a friend, a glorious night in the city before she flew home — then I peeled off solo, catching a train to Ventimiglia and along the coast to Fréjus. The train hugs the coastline the whole way — you sit there gazing at the Mediterranean in the sun, jumping cheaply from one beautiful town to the next, and something in your brain untangles.
I arrived at the station with my backpack and stories to tell, greeted Felix and his dad on the platform, and thought: more of this. This is what I want more of.
That was when I started looking seriously at Spain.
Following the wave south
I opened Idealista and started scanning the Spanish coast from the French border downward, looking for somewhere that made sense — close enough to France to combine trips, reachable by train, affordable enough to actually buy.
The pattern revealed itself quickly.
Barcelona I remembered from my twenties — rough, edgy, full of possibility. What I found on Idealista was a fully saturated metropolitan market, prices comparable to London, nothing in scope. So I kept scrolling south.
Valencia stopped me. It was obvious even then — a city still priced like a secret but not behaving like one. The coastline underdeveloped, swathes of wasteland and crumbling industrial buildings in areas that should be prime real estate. A city where local authority and private investment was pouring in at a rate I’d never seen in the UK. Property prices were rising at over 20% annually in some districts — the highest in Spain — and yet it was still a fraction of Madrid or Barcelona.
But by the time I was seriously looking, Valencia had moved. In the space of a year I was priced out. So I kept scrolling south.
Alicante was next. Smaller, sunnier, already in high demand. Fast trains to Valencia. An expanding airport with flights to most major European cities multiple times a day. Growing visitor numbers, growing buyer interest. And already — already — hard to find anything to buy because the city is so compact and demand keeps coming.
That was when I spotted the pattern properly.
The wave theory
Barcelona saturated. Money flows to Valencia. Valencia prices explode — 20-24% annually. Money flows to Alicante. Alicante tightens. And then?
The wave keeps moving south. It always does.
Below Alicante there’s a stretch of Spanish coastline that most UK buyers haven’t found yet — Santa Pola, Elche, Guardamar del Segura, Torrevieja, on toward Murcia and Cartagena and eventually Almería. Charming, undervalued, and every single one of them within an hour of the beach. The infrastructure is already there or being built. The demand from the north is already travelling toward them.
And even if the wave never comes, you wouldn’t need it to. There’s gold enough in just being there.
The Elche surprise
Elche was where I landed — and it surprised me completely.
On paper it made sense as an investment: university town, 30 minutes from Alicante, close to the airport, good rental demand. A solid feeder town. That was my thesis going in.
What I found was something else entirely. Elche is a genuinely beautiful historical city in its own right. An ancient palm grove — a UNESCO World Heritage site — running through the middle of it. A river. A pedestrianised old town with its own quiet charm. These aren’t investment checkboxes. They’re the kind of places that have real soul, that grow and mature as new investment arrives, as the tax base expands, as infrastructure improves.
I was wholly underestimating it.
The four-bedroom flat I bought in September 2025 wasn’t a compromise because I couldn’t afford Alicante. It was a deliberate position — taken on where the wave is going next. I bought it from London, on the strength of research, a sourcing pack, and a video walkthrough. I didn’t visit until January 2026, when Felix and I spent three weeks there once the refurbishment was done — exploring on foot and by rental car.
It was better than I’d imagined. The wave is coming. I just tried to get there first.