BEING located in the Spanish Mediterranean coastline, Almeria has loads of beaches, both conventional and nudist ones. Thus, there are two kinds of foreign tourists and expats here – the middle-aged British men and women who are fresh from retirement and would like to live a second life in Almeria so to speak. They were the baby boomers in Britain in the 1960s that dug into the Beatles before they went to their much-hyped United States tour across the Atlantic. The second group of foreign tourists and expats here are the gays and lesbians from the Scandinavian region who are the patrons of the nudist resorts. Thus understandably, most of the people here especially those working in the hospitality industry know how to speak English with the non-rhotic accent that are spoken in Britain as well as German and its variants which are spoken in the Scandinavian region. Staffs at the beach hotels are top of the line because they are graduates of Swiss hotel schools which are the best of their kind in the world. The resorts are likewise excellent in quality as they are inspected quarterly by European Union representatives for blue flag accreditation.

It’s so easy for the British and Scandinavian visitors to come here in Almeria because coming from Europe; they don’t need a visa to get here. Of course, our friends from Scandinavian countries such as Holland, Sweden and Norway can always get the Eurostar from their respective places which offer daily nonstop trips to Madrid and from Madrid, take a plane going to Almeria. The good news is that not only Spanish domestic carriers fly to Almeria but the passenger plane industry in Spain has already been entered by Irish investor Ryannair thanks to the deregulation of the industry in the country. And it’s not just the plane industry that is deregulated here but also the real estate one. That’s why British and Scandinavian tourists ultimately stay here for good and convert their properties into vacation homes to be leased to their countrymen who will also visit here as tourists. Their only obligation is to pay the annual income tax as well as the monthly garbage collection tax which goes directly to the government in Almeria.

Being a Mediterranean city, the diet here is surely a nutritious and healthy one. It consists mainly of seafood sautéed or grilled with olive oil, the healthiest cooking oil in the world because of its very low fat content. And because of this conduciveness, Almeria is being erected as the language haven of mainland Spain. That’s why people here also know the regional languages of the country such as Catalan and Basque. There are lots of Spanish language schools here for the British and Scandinavian visitors to learn. In fact, they will have their Spanish Linguistics International Conference here this April 3 to 5. Areas covered vary from psycholinguistics to corpus linguistics to computational linguistics to lexicology and linguistics engineering.