Leaving it all for the Costa Blanca: Déborah's gamble

Déborah arrived on the Costa Blanca five years ago, with a single certainty: that she wanted to start over somewhere else. She's one of those who have been through almost everything the families who settle here go through.

She had worked in television since 2009, first as a journalist on French public and private channels, on human-interest programmes where closeness and empathy counted as much as journalistic rigour, before quickly moving into other roles: editor-in-chief, then head of newsroom. The pressure of the ratings every morning, managing teams, the adrenaline of live broadcasting. She also made music and social documentaries. It's a trade that taught her to listen, to check, to go and find the right information before sharing it.

Once on the coast, it was her own questions and her own obstacles she had to learn to solve.

She remembers the first weeks of struggle to find somewhere to live, the early days in an unfamiliar health system, with no bearings and no doctor she trusted. She remembers, too, the questions that seem trivial and become a headache once you're here: which brands of baby formula or nappies to choose, who to ask for advice when you know no one.

She remembers the stress of looking for work in a country where everything has to be rebuilt: network, reputation. And then there were the Kafkaesque tangles of Spanish bureaucracy: NIE, empadronamiento, forms in triplicate, appointments impossible to get, doors closed with no explanation.

She asked herself all the questions that expats face when they decide to put down roots: international, bilingual or Spanish school for the children? Buy a flat or keep renting? How, as an adult, do you build a new circle of friends?

Over the months, a little like in Cédric Klapisch's The Spanish Apartment, a collection of first names ended up emerging. Agnès, Johan, the Marías, Merce, Patricia, Mar, Baptiste, Nico, Camilo, Jérôme, Llorenç, Elvira, Hugo, Marjorie, Matthias, Daria. Names that became familiar, a tight-knit group that took shape and became her second family.

All those difficulties, the Costa Blanca made up for a hundredfold. The slowness of the place, the closeness between people, the way newcomers far from home naturally pull together. The sea, always there to breathe when everything piles up. The habits picked up at the corner café, always warm. And the children playing in the street late at night, the fervour of the football grounds that hum on a Sunday, all of it becoming, without her quite noticing, a real part of her life here.

The Daily Costa Blanca is in fact a story that began before she even arrived. In 2021, from Paris, pregnant with her second child and already planning the move, Déborah launched a first version of the outlet: a series of interviews with local entrepreneurs, conducted remotely, like a line stretched towards the new life taking shape. Then the move and the children took over, and the project was put on hold.

Today, The Daily Costa Blanca is that intact desire resurfacing: to give a voice and a face to the people you cross paths with without ever really knowing them, to let their stories, their cracks and their victories exist.

A vision built on closeness, a love of portraits and true stories, of the connections you create between people, of the little everyday tips newcomers pass to one another, and of cultural discovery.

Today, Déborah wouldn't move back for anything in the world. It's this double experience, the journalist's and the newcomer's, that she puts at the service of the international community of the Costa Blanca through The Daily Costa Blanca, of which she is the founder and editorial director.

And you, your Costa Blanca story? Write to us: this Portraits section is yours.

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