This Global Walk Outside | Day 22: Spain
While Spain has recovered fairly quickly, it faced a lot of suffering at the beginning of the pandemic. We spent 46 straight days inside our flat… which has no private outdoor space. It’s just a three bedroom apartment; no yard, no patio, no terrace, no balcony. So, I try to create a sense of the outdoors with houseplants.
In the summer months, the corner window gets a lot of sun and my monstera gets scorched. But in the fall it thrives here and I love the jungle look it gives our living room.
The outdoor space that we do have is a shared patio in the center of our apartment complex. There we have a patio area with benches, some grass, a small playground, and our community pool, which is closed from mid-September to mid June.
We actually lived in a 3 bedroom condo in the states, so the size of our apartment is not much different. Our condo had a balcony and there was much more accessible green space around it. For the most part, we’ve made it work in Spain by spending time outdoors in public or shared spaces. We’re used to it now. During the quarantine I really had to fight for contentment and battle jealousy and frustration. A balcony would have made the whole thing much more bearable. I would love to drink my coffee on a terrace in the morning and wake up with true fresh air.
We play a lot of soccer in this area, but we have to avoid kicking the ball during siesta and late at night.
Sometimes they swing, but my kids have already outgrown this playground. They usually rollerblade around the area, play tag (pilla pilla) with other kids, or literally climb the walls.
In the summer we are here almost every day, sometimes twice. If we come in the morning, we are likely to have the place to ourselves.
Our downstairs neighbors have a patio that is fairly common for flats on the zero floor (that’s the 1st floor in the US). However, they sacrifice indoor space, as well as privacy, to have this.
We look down into our neighbor's patio from our living room and bedroom. I'd love to have a patio like this in the city, but the apartment only has 2 bedrooms and much less space.
This is me in one of our favorite parks that we have to drive to, Parque Juan Carlos II.
There are parks we can walk to, and we do, but we also have some favorite places we can escape.
Here the kids can climb olive trees, run around, roller blade, and play on structures.
In downtown Madrid, we love to visit the famous Parque El Retiro in the spring.
The thing I miss the most is an outdoor space for dining al fresco. Spain has a super late night culture, especially in the summer. We sometimes don’t eat dinner until 10 pm, which is when it’s finally cool enough to be outside. I long for a space to invite friends to eat and chat outside.
We don’t have air conditioning and our home is simply not a welcoming or enjoyable place to be for most of the summer. It is truly a lonely time, unless we can go out and meet others, which we do. But I really enjoy being a hostess, so that’s a bit sad for me. When we come back after our home assignment next year, we will be looking for a place with at least a tiny patch of outdoor space.
We have a lot to consider, though, because if we want a bigger outdoor space, we’ll have to consider moving away from our target community and into a pueblo, a small town, nearby.