Paper short abstract:

International retired migration mobility behaviour is now encouraged by space-time flexibility and desire for personal self-realisation. Choices related to the places they settle force them to reconsider their emotional attachments and important aspects of their lives.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most common important movements in the Spanish Mediterranean coastal is the International Retired Migration (IRM) receiving retired northern Europeans who seek a pleasant and healthier environment than their own. These life-course and residential mobility behaviour are now more encouraged because the space-time flexibilities and the aim of a personal self-realisation, creating based lifestyle diasporic communities. The reasons to move from one environment to another, the life period in which they decide to move, in many cases selling everything in their origin countries and the ageing process that follows place them to an important life decisions. The choices related on the place they settle, the relations that keep or not in their origin countries, the way they begin a new social life and the way they deal with the everyday difficulties confront them to reconsider from the emotional attachments important aspects of their life. Contradictions and feelings about family, care, sense of vulnerability, seek of a new community, solidarity, past and future places,uncertainties. My proposal focuses on these emotional aspects of this type of migration in the local context of the Costa Blanca focusing it on the contradictory relations with the host society. How their desires influence their way of life but at the same time, how their possibilities and needs shape their lives in the new context. The aim of the paper is to present particularly the perspective from those women who have experienced individual, social or family transformations that are inscribed in the sense of their migration option.