The Second Season

August is when the Costa Blanca sells itself, and it does the job so well that most people never question the timing. The flights are full of families, the beaches are loud, the terraces are packed until midnight, and somewhere between the second week and the flight home a couple decides they want to live here.

We understand it. We also think October is the better month to come back and look properly, and we think it is not close.

The weather has not gone anywhere

The first thing people assume about autumn is that they will be trading the weather for the quiet. On this coast that trade barely exists.

October holds 22 to 26°C through the day. The sea, which has spent all summer absorbing heat, sits at 21 to 23°C and stays swimmable well into the month. The light changes — it goes long and gold in a way that photographers come here for — and the evenings finally cool down enough to sleep with the window open.

What you lose is the crowd. Roads that took forty minutes in August take fifteen. Restaurants that needed booking a week out have a table. You can park at Jávea port on a Saturday afternoon, which anyone who has tried in August will recognise as a genuine claim about the season.

You are buying a town, not a holiday

Here is the harder argument, and it is the one that matters most.

In August, every coastal town on this stretch looks wonderful, because every coastal town is full. The bars are busy, the plazas are lively, the beach club is heaving. It is completely genuine and it is completely unrepresentative of the other ten months.

Autumn strips that out. Come in late October and you find out which restaurants stay open through the winter, which streets have residents rather than renters, which urbanisations have lights on in the evening and which have shutters down until Easter. You learn whether the supermarket you liked is a fifteen-minute drive in traffic or a five-minute drive without it.

None of this shows up on a listing. All of it determines what living here is actually like, and there is no way to see it in August because in August it is not there to see.

The rain is not the problem. Not seeing it is

The Costa Blanca gets most of its rain in autumn, and October is one of the wettest months of the year. Then there is the gota fría — increasingly called a DANA — an intense, localised storm system that can drop in a few hours what usually falls across several months. It typically arrives once to three times a year and it can cause real, localised flooding.

We are not going to skate past that, because we would rather you heard it from us in September than from a neighbour in November.

But we would also make an argument you may not expect: for a buyer, autumn rain is an asset.

A hillside plot in July tells you nothing about drainage. The same plot during a heavy October downpour tells you everything — where the water runs, whether the access road holds, whether the terrace sheds properly or pools against the house, whether the barranco at the bottom of the garden is a dry feature or a working watercourse. That is information no survey summarises as vividly as standing there in it.

So ask the direct question. Ask what happened to this property in the last DANA. Ask about the drainage on the access road. Ask to see it in the wet if the timing allows. A seller with nothing to hide will answer easily, and a property that handles autumn well has passed a test that most buyers never think to set.

Fewer buyers in the room

There is a commercial argument too, and it is straightforward.

The viewing calendar thins out between October and Christmas. Fewer buyers are on the ground, which means sellers are more attentive, agents have more time, and you are not making a six-figure decision at the pace of a summer market. You can see five properties properly instead of nine in a rush, go back to the one you liked on a different day and in different weather, and take the evening to think.

The stock does not vanish in autumn. The competition for it does.

Come in October

If you spent this August deciding you wanted to be here, come back in October and find out whether you were right. Swim, because you still can. Drive the roads at a normal speed. Sit in the town on a wet Tuesday and see whether you would still want to be there.

If the answer holds up in October, it will hold up in February.

If you would like us to arrange autumn viewings, or to talk through how a specific area handles the wet season, get in touch. We live here in all of it.