THE WAYPOINT SUR
I think we’re still staying.
Marking the homework we set in December
On New Year's Eve we published an issue called 2026: The Year Your Experiment Becomes a Decision. It argued that for the wave of people who arrived in 2022 and 2023, this was the year the Costa del Sol experiment stopped being an experiment: the year to look at the rent, the network, the life, and decide.
It went to 91 inboxes. Many, many more of you get this email now, so the odds are you never saw it. Which makes this a rare thing in publishing: we get to grade our own New Year predictions in front of a room that never heard us make them.
Eight months in, here is the score. The short version: we called the right year and misread where the pressure would come from.
The scoreboard
"2026 forces a decision." Held, for reasons we never wrote down. December framed it as a lifestyle call: your lease, your network, a self-imposed June deadline. What actually applied the pressure was administrative. The state spent the year removing the comfortable middle, the half-resident position where you could put the question off.
Count the ways, and we have come back to each of these since. Seven fiscal changes in 18 months squeezed the half-resident category, a pattern we connected in April. Day-counting on the non-lucrative visa went from folklore to enforcement, cross-checked against passports, banks, and utility bills. The padrón — town-hall census registration quietly changed jobs from headcount to verification, with healthcare, school places, and renewals hanging off one lapse. The EU's new entry-exit system started logging days at the border in April, and government mail now counts as delivered ten days after it lands in your official inbox, read or not. Every one of those systems was in motion in December. Our New Year issue mentioned none of them.
"Mortgage rates have stabilized around 3 to 4 percent." Broke. The European Central Bank raised rates a quarter point on 11 June 2026, its first hike since 2023. Twelve-month Euribor closed July near 2.85 percent against 2.08 a year earlier, and annual revisions are landing roughly €60 to €64 a month heavier on a typical €150,000 loan. Confirmed August 2026. We wrote a plateau into the year that ended the plateau.
"Look at property in Q1, before spring inflates asking prices." Mixed. Asking prices did climb all year; Málaga city reached €3,937 per square metre in July's Idealista print, a record. But there was no spring surge to outrun. Deeds tell the real story: closings ran 11 to 14 percent below asking through the first half. Confirmed August 2026. The competent 2026 move was patience, with an offer anchored to notary data rather than portal prices. Urgency was the wrong emotion, and we sold it.
"Málaga Tech Park: €3.5 billion in revenue, 25,000 employees." Held, and undersold. The 2025 figures came in at €4.1 billion and 27,940 employees, with a €615 million semiconductor research centre confirmed for 2030. The career-on-the-Costa claim aged better than we dared write it.
The letter worth opening early
One item on the scoreboard has a clock attached. If you hold a variable-rate Spanish mortgage, your next annual revision letter prices in the June hike, and by the end of July the market had a September follow-up about 85 percent priced in. We walked through how to get ahead of the revision letter in June, and the play has not changed: a binding fixed-rate quote costs nothing to request, and Spanish law keeps the switching fees low. Worth having the quote in hand before the letter arrives, whichever way you jump.
Start with the date on file
December ended by telling you to decide, and promised you would be right as long as you actually did. That advice holds. What we would add in August: before you weigh anything, spend €0 to €3 reading your own paperwork, because every renewal clock and entitlement above runs off it.
Ask your town hall for a certificado de empadronamiento — padrón registration certificate. Ten minutes at the counter, or online through your town's sede electrónica — official online office if you have a digital ID. In Málaga city that is sede.malaga.eu; elsewhere, search your town's name plus certificado de empadronamiento. Two lines matter. The registration date, which is the number officials use when they measure how long you have been here, whatever your memory says. And for non-EU residents without permanent status, the renewal date beside it, which the June padrón piece above explains in full.
Spanish-lite
Quisiera un certificado de empadronamiento — I'd like a padrón registration certificate
¿Qué fecha de inscripción figura? — What registration date is on file?
The bottom line
We told you 2026 would force a decision, and it has, just not the way we wrote it. The choice is still yours to make; what changed is the room you make it in. Spain spent the year removing the comfortable middle and keeping better records, our rate call broke, our urgency call backfired, and the thesis held anyway, on evidence we failed to cite. Get the certificate, read the date, and start any deciding from what is on file. That beats introspection, and it costs three euros.
If the certificate turns up a problem you would rather hand to someone bilingual, Navigator exists for exactly that.
Not bad for a Monday — A. and the WaypointSur team, grading our own homework in red ink.
