Hi there,
On April 11 we bought a house in Cenlle, a small village in Ourense. From the first moment, what attracted us the most was the tranquillity that the place offered: no noise, no people in the streets, just peace. Ideal to start a new stage.
When we arrived at the house, we met a lady in the house across the street. We decided to introduce ourselves. Her name was Julieta. The former owners had already told us that Julieta and Ricardo, the neighbours, were “a marvel”. And when we met her, the impression was good: warm, friendly, welcoming.
Although at first, we were told that the sale of the house was due to a separation between the former owners, we thought this was a lie.
Sergio and Susana, the former owners, had bought the house in August 2024, but in December they had already put it up for sale. This made us suspect that the real reason for the sale was more than just a simple separation. We thought that maybe they wanted to get rid of the house for some other reason that they were not telling us.
The communication during the buying process was strange. Every detail, every question we asked became a time battle. Sergio, who was the main contact, always said he had to check with Susana, and sometimes it would be days before we heard back.
When we got to the day of the deed, Sergio looked frankly devastated. He looked sad, exhausted, as if he just wanted it all to be over and done with. Although Susana was friendly at the time, we soon realized that there was something strange about her attitude.
When Sergio, in a moment of silence, said “I still trust you”, the phrase made us think that there was something much more complicated between them. Probably an infidelity.
As the days went by, Julieta told us more details. According to her, Susana, who was originally from the Balearic Islands, hardly ever came to the house. She spent few weekends in Cenlle, which made Julieta suspect that Susana had another life in the Balearic Islands, maybe even another person.
The house seemed a metaphor for the broken relationship between Sergio and Susana. A poorly kept place, and a general feeling of abandonment. They couldn’t even have painted it properly, nor placed a lamp correctly. It was logical to think that Susana, seeing the mess and Sergio’s lack of responsibility, decided to leave.
The surprises continued. Shortly after moving in, we discovered major leaks and a serious termite problem. According to the law, these are hidden defects that should be taken care of by the previous owners. We decided to confront Sergio, asking him to take responsibility.
He said he would solve the problem but asked that we send everything to Susana as well. As communication between these two was going so badly, we created a WhatsApp group to facilitate communication between all of us. The response was immediate: Sergio left the group, and Susana, far from being understanding, reacted aggressively. I even had to threaten her that my lawyer would get involved if the situation was not resolved.
It was then that we understood that Susana, who seemed so sympathetic, must be bipolar or, simply, someone very different from the person she showed in the first meeting. Her attitude on WhatsApp did not make any sense, and our patience quickly ran out.
As Julieta told us more about the ex-owners’ past, we understood better what had happened. Although we initially doubted the reasons for the separation, she confirmed that Susana had left in November, only three months after buying the house.
According to Julieta, Sergio, far from being so traumatized, had brought a woman into the house shortly after Susana left. This woman, according to Julieta, was not a friend with Alzheimer’s, as Sergio said, but someone else.
In the end, everything fell into place. Susana would come to the house, see the mess, the lack of maintenance, and realize that Sergio was not the person she wanted to be with. It was not worth leaving her life in the Balearic Islands to move into a dilapidated house with an uncertain future by her side.
Meanwhile, on the bright side of this story, there was Julieta. From the first weekend, she was what you would call a golden neighbour. Every time she saw me, she would ask me how we were doing, how the cleaning was going. And of course, I would tell her about the horrible things we found. She told us that Sergio had 2 cats, and the dog locked in the garage all day.
When she saw me sweeping, she offered to help me. She told me that her husband had a device to spray bleach more easily. And that’s how a chain of little big helps started. Ricardo showed up with that device and with another one to clean the moss on the stairs with pressurized water. He didn’t just lend it to us: he stayed helping all the time. Then he gave us a hand to move a huge barrel from the garage that we couldn’t lift between the two of us. Things that would have taken us days on our own, they solved in a short time, without asking for anything in return.
Along with the house, we had also bought three plots of land. Before, Julieta and Ricardo worked them under an informal agreement with Sergio: they took care of them and cultivated them, and in exchange they gave him part of the harvest. When I asked Julieta if she wanted to keep that deal, she told me that the potato season was over. Sergio left without warning, without saying goodbye, and without saying what would happen to the land.
I told her that we were keeping the agreement since we were not going to do anything with the land until we finished with all the pending things in the house. The following weekend, the land was cleared.
In one of our talks, I told her that the only thing I wanted to plant in the short term was a lemon tree. That every morning I drank lemon water, and that I couldn’t start the day without it. And after a while she came back with a bag full of lemons. And also, with a bottle of coffee liqueur. All that the first weekend, we hardly knew each other.
I loved her reaction when I told her we were vegans. She didn’t laugh, she didn’t ask absurd questions, she didn’t make offhand comments like people usually do. She just nodded, understood and never mentioned it again. We really felt respected.
And as in every story… the villainess
Cenlle has her own dark character. A lady who thinks she owns the village, parks wherever she wants, blocks Julieta’s and our garages.
The first weekend she came very rudely to tell us that we could not park where we were, even though we were not bothering anyone.
Julieta told us that this lady also stopped talking to them because of, quote unquote, Sergio and Susana. It turns out that, in winter, Susana wanted to get firewood out of the ruin and this woman’s car was blocking the exit. Sergio told Julieta, who went to talk to the lady to make her aware. From that day on, she never spoke to Julieta or Ricardo again.
In addition, this lady lives with a 93-year-old man who I thought was her father. In reality, he is a man who was brought to live with her to keep the inheritance money when he dies.
So far, that’s been our story with the neighbours. A movie start: with strange characters, a house full of surprises, but also two amazing neighbours who helped us a lot during the first three weekends of work, and who also entertain us with local gossip.
But I still have to tell you about the worst neighbor, one who is even worse than the villain and who has dedicated herself for years to harassing Julieta and Ricardo.