The first time I saw Torrevieja, I was not looking for property.
I was not even particularly trying to visit Torrevieja.
It was July 2017 and I was driving down to Spain with my son. We travelled through France, stopping at famous places and anywhere I thought might be interesting for a child.
Then I noticed something strange on the map.
Different-coloured lakes.
Obviously, I needed to know what they were. This particular detour was not really for my son. It was for me. 😂
What is that?
They were the salt lakes—the salinas around Torrevieja. One was an extraordinary reddish-pink colour.
So we went to investigate. We even swam in the red salt lake.
It was exactly the kind of accidental discovery I love: I saw something interesting and changed direction.
We stayed at Hotel Masa. The room was not particularly nice, but the pool, grounds and location were.
Then I saw more of Torrevieja.
My considered assessment?
“What an ugly town.” 😂
That probably will not get me a job with the tourism board, but it is genuinely what I thought.
I was not secretly assessing its investment potential either. I thought it was ugly. Why would I have been looking for property there?
As far as I was concerned, we had discovered fascinating salt lakes, stayed at a hotel with a nice pool and found a town I did not particularly like.
Then we carried on.
End of Torrevieja.
Or so I thought.
In fairness to Torrevieja…
The town I saw in 2017 is not exactly the Torrevieja I see today. It has improved, grown and continued developing.
But I am not rewriting my own history and claiming that I saw the potential.
I did not.
There was no brilliant “This is an undiscovered investment opportunity.”
There was: “What an ugly town.” 🤣
Which makes what happened next much funnier.
So how did I end up buying there?
You might assume I followed the market, studied the development and waited for the right moment.
No.
I saw an advert on Facebook Marketplace. 🤣
That is less impressive, but it is the truth.
How I moved from a Marketplace advert to owning, renovating and renting an apartment in a town I had dismissed as ugly deserves its own story.
The lesson I carried forward
First impressions matter, but they are not permanent market research. Places change—and so can the reasons for looking at them.
A Facebook advert can introduce an opportunity. It cannot verify one.
The moment curiosity became a serious purchase, I needed to stop treating it like an accidental travel discovery and start asking what I was buying, what it would cost and what could go wrong.
If I were starting again, I would use the questions I’d ask before buying property in Spain to investigate the opportunity.
That distinction eventually became part of the Spain Property Buyer Toolkit: curiosity can begin the search, but checking has to finish it.
Still, am I going to pretend that I foresaw all of this in 2017?
Absolutely not.
I was there because I saw funny-coloured lakes on a map.
And somehow, that is much more Clueless Gene anyway. 😂