Shopping in Spain

FOOD:

As an ex pat living in Spain you may find it difficult to find those ‘home comfort’ foods such as Peanut Butter, Marmite, and Thai curry paste however there will be areas where there are a number of predominantly English Urbanisation which usually have a local mini market selling ‘British’ known goods. Be careful as these are usually sold with an elevated price tag.
I am sure many of you ask family and friends to send bits and pieces over to you which may or may not reach you due to the slightly laid back postal service and unrecognised addresses in many areas of Spain.
My advice is to pop to your local ‘Carrefour’ they have an aisle solely for different countries products in the larger stores. You can find marmite, bourbon biscuits, Jaffa cakes, tinned hot dogs, Thai curry paste, noodles, and a variety of other items and they are usually the brands we are familiar with.
The fruit and vegetables you will see in both local, smaller supermarkets and in the larger ones will not look at beautiful as in our stores here in Britain, take no notice of the odd shaped bananas hat are not exactly 10 inches long or the apples that do not look bright green as you can be assured the flavour will be so much better.
There are also a number of online companies who will deliver your traditional British items to you – beware of some of the delivery costs.
In the larger cities you will find one or two ‘El Corte Ingles’ which are the equivalent of ‘John Lewis’.

CLOTHES:

Many of the clothes shops in Spain are familiar to us Brits, Zara, Mango, H&M, the beloved C & A which is still going strong in Spain even though no longer trading in Britain. I would say there are a similar amount of stores in terms of choice and they cover all walks of life, ages and tastes although they do tend to have more of the smaller sizes as the Spanish as a race are that little bit slighter than us Brits in general.
Shoes and handbags as well as wallets and small leather goods are a fantastic buy in Spain they are generally great quality and leather is much cheaper in Spain so you will undoubtedly bag a bargain.

TECHNOLOGY:

Much as we have Dixons and Curry’s, the Spanish also have large electronics / technology stores where you can buy a Wii, flat screen TV, cables games, microwave, white goods etc. Just make sure the instructions are also in English as they will automatically be set up to take the Spanish language.

Happy Shopping !!