... Does the fact that Chayofa is a community mean that it is a separate entity entirely from Aguilas Del Teide? I've always been slightly confused by the relationship between the two and assumed that it was part of Chayofa.

It is difficult to know where one finishes and the other starts because they do merge - rather like Las Americas and Los Cristianos nowadays.

One of the reasons that I mentioned it in the first place is that Chayofa is a community. Ok - it's what you would call in the UK 'a housing estate'. Although there are some 230 (ish) individual houses, they are all part of the community and pay towards the maintenance of the development, the communal pool, the gardens and roads etc.

There are certain developments in the Aguilas area that do not have a pool ... La Finca is obviously not one of them. It has been known for certain estate agents to tell prospective buyers in certain developments that - for example - Las Lomas is in Chayofa and that they can use our pool and have had keys cut. This is not the case.

During 2005 it cost our community almost 30.000€ to overcome the situation of unauthorised people trying to use these facilities, which is clearly unacceptable.

... Moan over ...

Chayofa has not been adopted by Arona council (although we are in discussion with them) and the easiest way to tell whether a location is Chayofa or Aguilas del Teide is to see if there is 'council' street lighting. All the roads in Chayofa are owned by the community, maintained by us, swept by us and lit by us.

The other reason for my original post was that someone mentioned that they wanted to live in Chayofa, but the price was prohibitive.

There are many misconceptions about the sort of property here and the price.

There are indeed many splendid houses that will cost millions of euros, but equally there are many affordable properties too.

Most peoples idea of the area is that it is a German community. Nowadays it is an internationally owned area. To be perfectly blunt about it, quite a few of the original owners have died and many more are becoming too old to travel - oops, I'll get into trouble for that, but it is a fact.

This has meant that there is occassionally property that can be bought relatively cheaply and remodeled and modernised so that you can get the exact house of your dreams.

Enough ... There are only a few people interested in this and I have recently changed my username and can't at this point send PM's - hence this rather lonf-winded post ... sorry!!!