doxa.comunicación | nº 31, pp. 107-129 | 117

July-December of 2020

Antonio Cuartero, Aida María de Vicente Domínguez and Francisco Báez de Aguilar González

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

For many years we came to Spain on holiday and always had the desire to come and live here. We chose Málaga because we needed to be close to a big city, for the culture. (…) first we also thought: “let’s try one year” and we had to extend it because one year was not enough to value it, and now we have a home that we like so we are still here. (Participant no.2, woman, 57 years old).

One of our neighbours told us that we should go to Andalusia, that Andalusia was very beautiful, and that we should visit it, and so we ended up talking about whether we should buy (a house) there or not. And in the end we decided to come to Málaga, to Benajarafe, and we saw this little house, we bought it and we come here to Andalusia, on holiday, every year for two or three months. (Participant no.4, man, 75 years old).

Such decisions also end up with the purchase of homes in the area. The data revealed in the surveys indicate that 39% live in owned homes, 42% in rented homes and 18% own a second home. These data must be interpreted bearing in mind that rental is quite firmly established in the German culture, and the price of housing in Germany is very similar to that of Spain – in some cases even lower. This explains why Germans still prefer to rent and not to be tied down when it comes to moving around for professional or family reasons and also when it comes to going on holiday. The fact that 42% of people live in rented homes is also, or essentially, related to the fact that German citizens in their own country prefer to use this type of housing to maintain their freedom. The data from our surveys show that 57% of Germans live in owned property – for 18%, it is a second home – and 42% live in rented homes. We might think that these percentages are very different from the situation in Spain (where 84%7 have at least one home of their own) or the European average of 70%, if we com-pare them with the situation in Germany, where rental is traditionally preferred and only 45%8 of Germans have their own home, although in recent years the tendency to buy more than rent has increased. We could therefore understand this to mean that they are adapting to local customs and showing their commitment to the place where they live.

The percentage of the German population that is active is relatively low, 21% are workers with a paid job and 16% are self-employed, the rest are retired (59%). This low percentage of self-employed workers is largely due, as already men-tioned, to the fact that opportunities for Germans to work in Spain are quite limited, and hence they tend to have compa-nies related either to the property market and construction or to translation, or in some cases to both of them combined.

The long-term future plans of this population on the Costa del Sol are clear: 91% say they intend to stay here for now. This can therefore be interpreted as indicating that the German population is already part of the cultural, media and economic ecosystem of the Costa del Sol.

4.2 The media diet of German residents on the Costa del Sol

The Germans living on the Costa del Sol, according to the results, are characterised by their consuming the media of their home country (87%) and the media produced for this group of European residents on the Costa del Sol (87%). Respond-