From a Boat Without an Engine to 30 Years of Open Frontiers

This year marks 30 years of Open Frontiers, and there is one memory that sums up how we started here.

We had a deed to sign in Sotogrande, but our office was still in La Duquesa at the time. The coast road was still a single lane in each direction, and, as often happened, it had come to a complete standstill. So we took the boat instead — it seemed faster, and it was, until the engine gave out halfway through the crossing. No notary that day. Instead, we were picked up by a passing fisherman, who brought us back to shore. On board that day: Belgian clients who, almost 25 years later, have become some of our closest friends.

That, I think, is the best proof that the things that feel like setbacks in the moment often become the best stories later on.

It didn’t start in Spain, but in Belgium, in 1996. The name came from a simple idea: we wanted to open the border for our clients. Belgians who dreamed of a home in France or Spain, but had no idea how to navigate a foreign system, a foreign language, a foreign notary. That was — and still is — the heart of what we do.

In December 1998, we moved to Spain ourselves, to La Duquesa, to take over an existing office. It soon turned out the office wasn’t officially registered at all — no company, no legal structure. Instead of inheriting a business, we had to build one from scratch. In 1999, we did exactly that, from La Duquesa. (You can read the fuller story of those early years in The History of Open Frontiers.)

We could have stayed in La Duquesa. But in 2001 we moved to Sotogrande, for one simple reason: it was — and is — a uniquely beautiful place. At the time, the area had fewer than 5,000 permanent residents. Our children started at the Sotogrande International School that year, which then had around 460 students. Today there are more than 1,400, with a waiting list.

In 2002,AP-7 motorway opened between Estepona and Guadiaro, and the coast road was finally widened to two lanes. Almost overnight, or so it felt, Sotogrande became reachable. That road may have done more for this region’s future than anything else: it turned a beautiful, hard-to-reach place into a beautiful, easy-to-reach one — and those are two completely different markets.

I could list endless numbers — more residents, more schools, more of everything. But the honest truth is that what made us move to Sotogrande in 2001 is still exactly why people choose it today: the space, the quiet, the sense of being part of a real community rather than a resort. We didn’t move here because it was convenient. In 1999, it was anything but. We moved here because it was worth the boat ride.

This year, Open Frontiers turns thirty. Still with the same name, the same conviction, and — I’ll say it myself — still with clients who end up becoming friends.

Thirty years is a strange number to sit with. It’s long enough to have watched a two-lane coast road become a motorway, a school of 460 children become one of 1,400, and a handful of clients become the closest thing we have to family here. It’s also short enough that I remember all of it clearly — the boat, the empty office in La Duquesa, the quiet certainty that Sotogrande was worth the risk. Thirty years in, that certainty hasn’t changed at all.

Ben Buyl founded Open Frontiers in 1996 and has lived in Sotogrande since 2001. This is the first in a series of personal reflections marking 30 years of Open Frontiers in the region.
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