This book focuses on the lives of a group of women from the UK who moved to the Costa Blanca in Spain in retirement. We follow their journeys as they seek ‘community’ and belonging in a world characterised by rapid social change. Imbued with nostalgic yearning, community is hailed as a panacea to the ills of modernity and as a representation of social continuity. Nostalgia denotes the mourning of a lost home or place and a lost time – and in this way – the search for community and belonging can also be understood as a quest for another epoch. For many of these women, migrating in retirement symbolises a movement back in time as well as across space: they moved to Spain to escape Britain in an uncertain present, and to return to an imagined ‘England’ of the past. Women's different migration trajectories are disaggregated, considering return migration to the UK alongside permanent settlement in Spain and temporary residence, allowing for further exploration of what community and belonging mean to people in different contexts at different times, and how the search for community and belonging for some, also shape decisions to return ‘home’. The women featured imagine and create their own solutions to feelings of dislocation, both in the UK and in Spain, against the backdrop of policy and political uses of community in the UK.

Retiring to the Costas

Over the last 30 years and during the first decade of the new millennium in particular, retirement to the Spanish coastal resorts (costas) has been increasing. Globalisation, economic growth and EU enlargement following the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, allowing nationals to settle and buy properties (Warnes et al, 2004; Janoschka, 2011; Huete and Mantecon, 2012) have all been significant in shaping the expansion of new forms of migration. Additionally, speculative purpose-built housing development, stimulated by house price inflation from the mid-1980s in Europe, coupled with the rise in estate agents for international markets have been important in creating residential estates known as urbanizaciones for British migrants in Spain (Casado-Díaz, 2006).