A little tolerance please

 Originally,  the houses on our estate were largely sold through agencies such as Atlas and Euro Anglo Sur who marketed the properties widely in Britain as well as here in Spain. The majority of people who bought were therefore English speakers. 

One or two properties were sold directly by Star Sol to local buyers and some were privately built by Spaniards who would have bought the land from Star Sol. 

We were told that the prices offered by Star Sol were considered too high at the time by many locals. For example, one of my neighbours told me he paid much the same price to build his much larger house on a substantially larger plot than we did for our house. 

Things changed. Many of the original buyers have sold up for various reasons for prices that dropped drastically during the slump. The houses were marketed by local estate agents to mostly Spanish clients. 

That brought a change in the demographics. Instead of being a mainly English urbanisation, it gradually became a Spanish speaking community with just a handful of Brits remaining. 

A few months back, squatters were spotted in one of the abandoned houses on the Altas de la Pedrera part of the estate. A WhatsApp group was formed to discuss the issue and any other issues that were relevant to us. 

If it wasn't clear before, it soon became obvious that Villas Andrea was now a Spanish development outside of a Spanish town. The majority of people who joined the WhatsApp group were Spaniards.

However, there are still a handful of Brits and other nationalities living here. Most have taken the trouble to learn at least enough Spanish to get by - some a lot more. 

In Britain we have words and expressions that are only understandable to native speakers and often only to people that are local to the area where we are speaking. For example, in Liverpool they describe something bad as “last” and something that is good as “sound”. Even native speakers from other areas may misunderstand the meanings of these words. Those who have English as a second language don't stand a chance. 

It is the same here in Spain. Native speakers use words and expressions that are meaningless to those of us for whom Spanish is a second or even third language. 

What I am getting to is that, some of the conversations on our WhatsApp group may not make immediate sense to us. 

By the same token, if we are writing a comment to our remaining English speaking neighbours, we may need to write in English for them to understand fully what we are saying. 

We agree fully with the idea that, living in Spain – we should at least try speak in Spanish. Please forgive us if that is not always possible.