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In the evening, the cranes roost on every available patch of empty ground, their long necks silhouetted motionless against the sky. All day, bull-like lorries of pre-mix concrete charge up and down the hills, bellowing and snorting.

To say that Andalucia is undergoing yet another building boom is an understatement. The Spanish have always been keen on building — the first thing they did after conquering Granada was to build an enormous cathedral in the middle of the Alhambra, marking their territory — but what is going on now is almost a self-destructive building frenzy like the Easter Islanders with their statues. Much of coastal Andalucia is being buried in concrete apartments that no one will want to buy and hotels that few will want to stay in. Most roads seem to have been replaced at least twice in 20 years, hardly a mountain left without a tunnel or a valley without an expensive new viaduct.

In the Alhambra, if you reserve a ticket for 8.30am entry, there are briefly more swallows than tourists in the myrtle courtyard. Their shadows flicker across the walls while their reflections flicker across the water in perfect synchronicity. You realise that the Moors would have noticed that too, but otherwise there is little contact with the original inhabitants. The Alhambra is now public property, wiped clean of memories. Nothing remains of them that could not be looted or destroyed, driven out bag and baggage, leaving only their tiles behind

Not only are there no Moors where we are staying on the coast, there are also precious few Spaniards. It turns out to be one of those peculiar English enclaves that were briefly, about 20 years ago, the subject of a famously bad BBC soap called Eldorado. It’s a surprise to find they really exist, and fascinating it is too.

The enclave is not a bad looking place with the concrete structures disguised as whitewashed hacienda-style villas and apartments with terracotta roofs and more Moorish tiles. There are lots of steps, plants, narrow, white-pebbled alleys and no high rises. Nor is there anything wrong with the villa we are staying in. If it was in Cornwall would cost three times as much and be booked up a year in advance.

This is far from the worst excesses of the Costa del Sol like Torremolinos on the other side of Malaga, an area damned forever by Monty Python along with Watneys Red Barrel. But some of the restaurants don’t even bother to have menus in Spanish.

The Moors expelled from this part of Andalucia mostly moved to north Africa, some of them becoming Barbary pirates, and one Sunday in July 1625, the inhabitants of Mount’s Bay in Cornwall were in church when the door was smashed down and they found themselves surrounded by men in djellabas wielding scimitars; as nasty surprise go, that is right up there with the worst of then. The entire population of the village was taken into slavery to spend the rest of their lives rowing galleys and selling timeshares.

The occupants of the enclave are voluntary migrants, although equally trapped. The building boom has flooded the market and their apartments, villas and bars are virtually unsaleable.

They are people who have asked themselves the wrong questions and come up with the wrong answers. “Wouldn’t it be fun to run a bar in Spain?” “When we retire and the children leave home, wouldn’t it be nice to go on holiday and not come back?” “Isn’t it just like England but with cheap alcohol and better weather?” The correct answer to all these questions is “no”, and life in the enclave lacks everything that makes life worth living in England; the weather and the booze are too high a price to pay. Not the least of the problems if you are staying for longer than a week is that there really is nothing to do.

Many of the villas and apartments have been bought in the mistaken impression that the owners could let them out when they’re not there and they would pay for themselves. Our villa has a musty smell by the door to the roof terrace, a house left empty too long. A note in the kitchen warns against leaving food lying around in case it attracts “beetles”. Most of the accommodation in the enclave is empty, even in high summer, giving it the slightly weird air of an out of season resort despite the perfect weather.

The bars are run by couples with names like Bev and Kev who specialise in “home cooking” with particular emphasis on the deep fryer — actually quite appropriate as English fish and chips has its admittedly distant roots in the cooking of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Andalucia at the same time as the Moors. Bev and Kev keep smiling (“Yes, we love it here! Look at the weather”) even though they are up to their necks in debt.

There are also traces of that other semi-mythical place usually only encountered on television, the Costa del Crime. The bar at the bottom of the hill at the downmarket end of the enclave would appear to be largely populated by Mancunian crooks. “Hello,” says one of them who greets you with a disconcertingly friendly smile, but he doesn’t move out of your way and your instincts tell you to turn round and get out while you can. The evening’s advertised attraction was “Family entertainer Niel Phillip’s”.

At the top of the social pile are retired couples with names like Winnie and Willie.

I am not much of an expert on middle England, but the class distinctions in the enclave appear at first sight to be not just more pronounced than in England but to belong to an altogether earlier time.

You expect with people who have been out of England a long time that their “Englishness” is frozen at the moment they left home while the England they left behind has carried on changing without them. You get cornered by them in bars across the world, terminally nostalgic for an England that no longer exists. But that process usually takes 10 or 20 years for it to be instantly noticeable and often they have absorbed enough of their new country to compensate.

Perhaps when people move abroad they take it as an opportunity to adopt a new persona: the British in Spain playing at being the British in India with the sun still shining on the Empire, just as the real British in India were playing at being the English aristocracy back home, and not doing it very well.

Willie is happy that his years as secretary of the Orpington Round Table or whatever have not gone to waste, his well honed skills of being a total pain in the arse are still appreciated on the residents’ committee, drawing up lists of those who have not paid their dues and are therefore NOT ALLOWED TO USE THE POOL.

Winnie, though, wanders about looking hopefully for a new English face to talk to about the wonderful weather. “My daughter is taking her family to the Lake District this weekend,” she says. “Torrential rain!” She looks up at the sky and smiles. “Another heavenly day!”

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