Costa Blanca expats feel Brexit pinch as exchange rate dives

“When you live here, you’re not on holiday, you’ve got to have something to get up in the morning for,” says Jean Cooper, as she looks across the immaculate astroturf lawn of the La Siesta bowls club. “If you’re on holiday, you go down to the beach, you’re in the pool, you go out for meals. But we get up and we go bowling.”

A native of Brecon in Wales, Cooper (75) has lived in Spain for nearly 15 years. She is one of an estimated 300,000 British residents in the country, about 10,000 of who live here in Torrevieja, a resort 40 minutes' drive from Alicante, on the Costa Blanca.

Bowls is big with clubs all along the coast. But only a handful of Spaniards play the sport. Instead, virtually all those who practise it here are British citizens, mainly retired, who tend to live in gated communities outside the centres of towns on or near the coastline.

With the arrival of the scorching summer, the bowls season recently ended and the La Siesta club is quiet. But Jean Cooper worries the silence could become more permanent due to Britain's vote to leave the European Union. She has friends who have already returned to the UK because of Brexit.

“Some people don’t have an option,” she says. “There are people out here that rent properties, they rely on their income every month, they know how much they need to survive out here.”

In many cases, that income has been dented by the drop in the value of the pound against the euro in recent weeks, making British pensions worth less. Jean Cooper says her monthly pension has dropped by €50. One of her neighbours, John Wilson, tells The Irish Times his income has already dropped by €200 since the Brexit vote.

Many of these expats used their savings in Britain to buy the properties they own in Spain – often a large villa with a garden and a pool. Now, in the wake of Brexit, belts are being tightened “You have to think twice: ‘Can I go out for this extra meal? Can I go out for the day?” says Cooper.

The other big concern for a community mainly made up of pensioners is healthcare. Currently, British residents in Spain have full access to Spain’s state health service, which is free of charge. But that could change if, or when, British residents are no longer EU citizens.

"It's a good health service here and if we've got to pay private, it's a lot of money, isn't it?" says Anne Cogin, from Cornwall, who has been living in Torrevieja for 15 years. She is in the car park of the British supermarket Iceland, which has a branch popular with expats.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen – if we’ll have to pay for private [healthcare].”

Nearby, Geoffrey Wild, from Yorkshire, is loading up his car with groceries. Not only is he worried about healthcare and the exchange rate, he is furious Brexit was even put to a vote.

“The referendum should never have been called on such a wide, broad issue that nobody knows the answer to,” he says. “Facts should have been put to us, instead of lies.”

But it’s not just the expats who are dismayed anxious about possible repercussions. With British citizens making up about 10 per cent of Torrevieja’s permanent residents, and more spending time here in the winter, their presence and spending have a substantial impact on the local economy.

In his office in the small central square of Torrevieja, mayor José Manuel Dolón of the Green party admits an exodus of British residents from Spain would be bad for towns all along the Spanish coast.

“If such an important, influential community were to leave, it would affect everything,” he says.

Dolón is proud of the cosmopolitan atmosphere in Torrevieja, where Bulgarians and Indians rub shoulders with Colombians and about 500 Irish residents, as well as the British, who are the dominant foreign community. However, the mayor is optimistic that whatever impact Brexit has on British residents, they are unlikely to leave in large numbers.

This, he explains, is because many invested in Spanish property a decade or more ago, when prices were high. Spain, he points out, has still not fully recovered from the bursting of its property bubble since that boom.

“If they made an investment and the market value of their property is much lower – say it’s worth just 60 or 65 per cent of what they paid for it – this prevents many people from being able to return to the UK,” he says. “You could say that they are hostages of the economic situation of Spain at the moment.”