Bidding adios to work and Sydney, Erna and Alex decide to pursue a dream of living in the north of Spain. They fall in love with a tiny Castilian village and set about restoring a long-forgotten, falling down villa that will soon be their new home.
Letting go of old ways, they get swept up in the colourful goings-on of their Spanish neighbours and the challenges of living a new life on a new continent – all while becoming minor celebrities among baffled locals who can’t understand why anyone would want to cross the world to live in their modest village.
Sunset in Spain is a warm, funny and poignant story of a couple’s search for new challenges and the joys to be had in ramping things up when most of us would be happy to start winding down.
Erna Walraven was a Senior Curator at Taronga Zoo in Sydney for two decades, where she was responsible for the care of some 400 wild animal species, a career that inspired her to write numerous non-fiction books about animals. She’d fallen in love with Spain in her early twenties and always harboured a dream of living there. After retirement, her husband Alex and herself set off to do just that, finding a house in a small provincial town northeast of Madrid called Almazan.
Sunset in Spain is the story of that trip, and Erna’s renewed love affair with Spain. Gorgeously written, she transports you to the rural roads, the gravity-defying castles hanging off rocky cliffs, cobbled streets and local markets with displays of fish, meat, cheese, fruit and vegetables, the language, the etiquette, the spirited locals and the siestas.
For the past couple of years, travel memoirs have felt torturous – a reminder of freedoms lost in the pandemic. But now, with travel again an option, this was more than just excellent armchair travel – it’s inspiring. It’s a wonderful story about one couple embracing the next stage of their lives with passion, curiosity and courage.
Great travel literature depends not on location alone, but also on the likability of the author. Erna is warm, wise and very witty. She’s clearly adventurous, with the perfect partner for that in husband Alex. I was swept up in their adventure, cheering them on as they fell in love with life in Spain.
But just as their dream became a reality – to move there permanently – the world went into lockdown, with Erna and Alex stuck on the other side of the world during a visa run. Did they find their way back to Almazan?
Sunset in Spain is a delightful reminder of how life should be lived, at home and abroad.
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