Living in Alicante

We live in an area which is mainly high rise apartment buildings. Ours has 9 floors of apartments which is typical in our immediate area. Further from us there are some taller buildings, up to about 20 floors. In Europe the floor you walk in on is the ground floor (or floor/piso 0), 1 flight up is the first floor, 2 flights up is the second floor, and so on…

I’ve mentioned to some of you that people in Spain tend not to have clothes dryers. Reasons for this that I have seen include energy costs, space limitations, and the availability of plenty of sunshine and warm temperatures for outside drying. In some of the older buildings I suspect space is truly limited as you often see clothes hanging outside the windows. The example in the picture probably has more than you would typically see.

Our building is relatively new, finished in 2020. The apartments seem designed to have a bit more interior space for a laundry room so you don’t see clothes hanging outside.  This picture shows our apartment on the second floor (remember, 2 flights up) with the window shades lowered unevenly (oops). 

Most apartments have an outside patio that is not enclosed; ours is enclosed which makes the interior space larger. The three windows on the left in the picture are where the dining area is; the last window on the right and half of the brown louvered section is where the laundry room is. I have included pictures from inside so you can get a better idea. 

The laundry room is not part of the air conditioned space. We have a drying rack and the air is plenty warm for drying clothes. However, for sheets and towels we go to a laundromat.

It seems a lot of the older buildings did not incorporate air conditioning when they were built. Many have since added individual units that hang outside as you can see in the next couple of pictures. 

Fortunately, being a newer building, we have central air conditioning. Every day for the past 6 weeks we have had high temperatures between 85 and 90 (though I should be getting used to thinking in Celsius; that would be about 29 to 32).