We were shocked and three of our family nearly killed in November! At the end of the garden was a small ruin that had been unoccupied and used for storage only. One day two Spanish workmen turned up at eight o’clock in the morning and explained that they had been tasked with restoring the house for the owner who had inherited the property recently. They asked was it ok for them to come into the garden to work on the outside of the walls from our land, to which we agreed. They spent the whole of that day erecting scaffolding up inside the building and hammering away at the walls. Just after five o’clock Josh discovered that they had managed to cut our phone line off and he didn’t have internet access so he headed across the garden to reconnect the line. Mum and Norman were packing up after a full days work and got in the van to go back to their apartment. Mike had got home and headed for a shower, as he finished and came out he said there was an almighty rumble, like a bomb had gone off, he rushed to the door and could only see a dust cloud where the garden used to be which was mushroom shaped like a nuclear bomb had exploded. He knew that Josh was in the garden and started to dread the worst when he appeared coughing and spluttering, covered in dust with two eye holes peeping out. He had been standing next to the ruin when it collapsed, luckily he hadn’t been sat down or he couldn’t have reacted quickly enough to escape the debris. As it was he had been hit on the arm with some stones, we knew he was ok though when he started swearing that he was wearing his new surf cords and if they were damaged he wanted them replacing! Norm and Jenny had driven out of the garden and were a second away from driving past the front of the ruin, they had slammed the brakes on watched the house tumble into the road in front of them.
Have a look at the photos, the road was closed for 4 days whilst they cleared the debris, it caused chaos around the village as this is the road that all the school traffic exits on including the buses. They had also managed to cut the phone lines for the Ayuntamiento as well as our house which did not go down well with the mayor! We are told that they will rebuild the house in modern block, but to date there is still just a hole in the ground where it used to be. Part of me was horrified that the locals might think that we had something to do with this and then another part of me was really proud that it obviously isn’t easy to restore these old stone walled houses but we had managed it!