Who doesn’t dream of a better life in the Spanish sunshine? While British evenings are getting darker earlier and electricity bills are going up, Majorca still enjoys sunny days and balmy evenings.

Little wonder, then, that Mandy Green and her then husband Mark fell in love with the island – and one day made the impulsive decision to move there from their home in chilly Dunfermline, Fife.

They ended up spending 17 years in Majorca and, in many ways, Mandy, 61, feels nostalgic about their life in the sun.

‘I miss so much about living there, from the fresh fruit still on sale at this time of the year to being able to walk barefoot on the beach,’ she says.

But the now-divorced mother of two, who returned to Scotland six years ago and lives alone, definitely doesn’t miss the downsides of being an innocent abroad – from getting fleeced by locals to being hit by unexpected tax demands.

The restaurant business Mandy and Mark took on – proudly calling it M&M’s – proved to be a bottomless financial black hole and the stress of running it eventually took its toll on their marriage. Mark has since set up home with a local Spanish woman.

Yet, it all seemed so full of promise back in 2001, when they made the decision to move. They had been married for 12 years and were not unhappy in Fife. Professionally, the couple were on the up. Mark worked as a chef and Mandy was a hotel manager when they decided to make the move to Spain. They were confident they could transfer their hospitality skills to a Mediterranean culture and climate.

‘We’d only been on holiday in Majorca twice, but we were smitten with the Spanish way of life,’ says Mandy. ‘We bought a restaurant-bar in the beachside resort of Santa Ponsa. We did all the right things, using a well-known estate agent and a reputable accountant, but no one sat us down and told us about the taxes and bills you had to pay. We’d get hit with out-of-the-blue tax bills.’

Their first task was to find somewhere to live – which was much harder than expected in a tourist town where so many apartments are holiday lets. Estate agents seemed to assume that, as they were British, they had plenty of money.

Mandy lived in three different properties during her time on the island.

‘When we first moved over, we’d look at properties for rent on the Spanish rental websites and arrange an appointment to view them, but as soon as the landlord knew we were British, they’d increase the prices,’ she says.

‘One three-bedroom flat we saw was advertised at €400 (£350) a month, but it shot up to €600 (£520) a month as soon as the landlord heard us say “Hola”.’

Spain is the number one destination in Europe for Brits who want to move abroad to start a new life. Most are attracted to the slower pace of life, Mediterranean climate and mild winters.

Everything from property prices to daily living costs are – generally – much cheaper.

Official Spanish government statistics suggest that last year there were 275,000 UK nationals living legally in Spain, but the real figures are thought to be much higher, with expat newspaper The Local estimating that at least 403,925 are based there.

Mandy had enjoyed living in Scotland, but was concerned for her children’s welfare.

‘Our son and daughter, then 16 and 15, got in with the wrong crowd. We didn’t want that for them and they loved the idea of living in another country.

‘It was always going to be Majorca – we’d fallen in love with the island and knew it was where we could start a dream life together as a family. We arrived with just our suitcases.’ They sold the family home (although Mandy kept a property in Scotland which she’d bought with an inheritance) and rented a four-bedroom apartment in Santa Ponsa, on the west coast of the island.

‘The apartment had all mod-cons, access to a pool and air con,’ she says.

They then bought a restaurant in the beachside town which could seat up to 40 guests.

‘I didn’t speak any Spanish beforehand. What we couldn’t get our head around was the amount of money we had to fork out each month. We had an accountant whose job seemed to be serving us bill after bill,’ she says.

‘We’d been in our restaurant for a month when our accountant presented us with a tax bill for €300 (£260). It totally took us by surprise as we had no idea what it was for and it wasn’t something we’d been told to budget for.

‘While the restaurant did well, our customers were mainly holidaying Brits. There were so many things we didn’t expect. Food supply prices went up and down all the time. There were constant tax surprises.

‘I wish I’d spoken to other business owners first so I’d known about all of the extra charges. Being open seven days a week was exhausting and working in the heat was horrendous.

‘Yet guests were envious of my life in Spain and would routinely ask me how easy it was to make the move.’

While Mandy made friends and learnt to get by in Spanish, her daughter returned to Scotland after seven years.

Her son, who was by now a chef, left the island, too, and moved to Ireland where he stayed for eight years.

Three years after their children left, the couple admitted they were ‘exhausted’ and sold their restaurant.

‘I got a job in a hotel working days, while my ex worked evenings as a chef, but it meant we barely saw one another.

‘By now we’d moved a third time to an inland village, purely to get away from the tourists. In the evenings we’d relax together, but by then we had grown apart. We split in 2016.

‘No one else was involved, I don’t think. Ten months later my ex started seeing a Majorcan woman he is still with today.’

In 2019 Mandy got a call from her daughter – now a mother of two – to say her relationship had broken down. Mandy could tell she needed her mother, so returned home. Mandy has lived in Scotland ever since.

Helen Morris, 45, a married mum of one from Shropshire, fell for Spain while on holiday in Murcia, south of Alicante, in 2019.

As she explains: ‘We were sitting in an English pub and commented on how lovely it was. We were told it was for sale. It was one of life’s sliding doors moments. There and then we decided to buy it.’

Helen and her husband Mike, who had two decades of experience when it came to running pubs, found themselves, six weeks later, the owners of Finnegans bar – for which they’d paid €160,000 (£140,000).

‘We weren’t novices when we took it over and it was busy from the off. It wasn’t a Spanish bar but a themed pub – that’s what holidaymakers wanted.’ As a teenager, Helen had spent a decade in Majorca with her mum so was able to speak Spanish. Yet Mike had never lived in Spain before.

Even so, not only did the couple invest in the bar, they also ploughed €280,000 (£245,000) into a ‘little finca’ – a farmhouse with a pool.

‘Initially it was a brilliant life. In the mornings, I’d get out of bed and have a swim. After a few lengths, I’d enjoy breakfast by the pool. We only worked in the evenings so it was an easy life with no worries. There were no £600-a-month electricity bills, either.’

While the first 12 months were ‘perfect’, with the expat community making the couple feel welcome, what frustrated Helen was the attitude of the locals.

‘In Murcia they were very racist towards the English. Places like Marbella embrace expats, but the small fishing village where we were based just didn’t welcome change. Every time I tried to do something it was “no comprendo”.

‘I knew a fair bit of Spanish but they’d pretend they couldn’t understand what I was saying. The local dialect means they lisp and cut the end off the words. It was hopeless trying to communicate.’

Spanish bureaucracy also proved a nightmare. ‘We definitely paid over the odds regarding taxes. I’d pay the staff’s social contributions but get a letter telling me I hadn’t. The official authorities weren’t interested in proof of payment, they’d threaten me with an “embargo” on my car which meant I’d be prohibited from driving it.’ She was soon regretting their impulsive move.

‘When did I recognise I’d made a mistake? If I’m honest, pretty much straight away. We couldn’t get any help from locals at all and it was only afterwards that all of the English people we spoke to were frank about the Murcians being utterly unaccommodating.

‘It was frustrating because we loved our home and our bar.’

Away from work, Helen also found it difficult to relax. ‘Our first neighbour left his dogs outside, chained up in the heat without any water. You could see the ribs of his horses, they were all neglected. I complained to local animal charities, but they weren’t interested.

‘When he moved on, a young lad moved in and turned the property into an illegal club. Our walls would vibrate when he played his music. I constantly complained and yet no one came out to assess what was going on.

‘He was even selling drugs out of his living room window and, despite providing evidence to the police, no one checked.

‘I eventually contacted the chief of police and accused him of having someone on his staff taking a backhander from my neighbour because of the lack of interest.’

In 2023, Helen gave birth to her daughter Molly. ‘We wanted to get her into a decent nursery and put her name down for a school, but the local one was full of Moroccan children. That wasn’t what we wanted for her. I looked into private schools and was told there was a two-year waiting list.

‘We couldn’t go out to our local park because the greenery around it was routinely sprayed with a pesticide known to cause cancer in children and dogs.’

So, last year, the couple made the decision to return to the UK and now run a pub in Shropshire.

‘We still own the bar and the Spanish finca, but rent them out,’ says Helen.

‘Looking back on it, my biggest lesson from all of this is to do more research. Don’t just Google – you need to spend a good six months in the area before buying.

‘I loved everything about the Spanish way of life. I much prefer tapas and paella to English food. Even my daughter will only eat chorizo and serrano ham.

‘The overseas property programmes [like A Place In The Sun] sell a fantasy and seduce people with a way of life that just doesn’t exist. Whenever friends imagine what life could be like for them in Spain, I tell them they’re living in cloud cuckoo land.

‘Yes, I miss the sunshine and relaxed vibe, but there really is no place like home.’

In 2019, retired nurse Sandy Mansfield ‘persuaded’ her husband Roger, who ran his own printing company, to move to the Andalusia area in southern Spain.

‘As a child, my parents took my sister and I to the coastal town of Nerja and we loved it there. Even today, if I close my eyes, I can still smell the sangria my parents used to drink at cocktail hour.

‘Every single autumn, when the nights would draw in where we lived in Dorset, we’d barely see any sunshine. I’d feel as though the skies were closing in on me.

‘I definitely suffered with seasonal affective disorder during the winter. For decades I went on at Roger about returning to Spain, and when we got access to our lump sum pension at 55, we decided to give it a go. The children had flown the nest. What did we have to lose?’

So the couple bought a one-way ticket to Malaga – with one proviso. Roger persuaded Sandy not to get rid of all of their possessions and property in Dorset.

A reluctant Sandy agreed to renting for a year; only after 12 months – if they were both in agreement – would they sell up in the UK and make the move permanent. Today Sandy describes with relief how wise her husband was to insist they kept a foothold in the UK.

‘Everyone goes on about the cost of living being cheaper, but we didn’t experience that. We paid almost €1,500 (£1,310) a month for a crushingly ordinary apartment in Nerja. The air-con units leaked and the walls were thin, too.

‘As for my memories as a child, the town had expanded a fair bit since then. There was noise all the time and it was a lot less authentic than I remembered.

‘I appreciate I sound like a hypocrite, but all we ever heard were English voices.’

‘From the moment we arrived in the autumn, things started to go wrong,’ says Sandy.

‘The pool was a communal one for residents, yet local children and teenagers used it, too.

‘It sounds silly to say we were forever having problems with our satellite connection but we were.’

The couple returned to the UK nine months after they had left.

‘For a month before we made the decision to leave, I’d been having nightmares: I was locked in our apartment and couldn’t get out. I was being suffocated.

‘Thankfully Roger put two and two together. I cried with relief when he suggested that perhaps we could go home. I told my friends that my mum, who had been diagnosed with dementia, needed me back home. And while that was true, the reality is we’d have come home regardless.’

Back in Scotland, Mandy has lived alone since she returned in 2019 and works six days a week as a carer. ‘Did we do the right thing in moving to Spain? I do wonder. My daughter never settled and I’m divorced.’

On miserable days she says she wishes she could click her heels and be transported back to Spain – but then remembers the reality. That place in the sun is not always so sunny after all.

Helen and Mike’s names have been changed to protect their identities.