If the American satirical newspaper The Onion were to turn its irony to the British press, I suspect it would come up with the headline “Tarty Blonde Fails to Make a Fortune on Her Home in the Sun”. Pouting females in the property sections, of course, never fail to make money on their holiday homes: pots and pots of it, in fact. And now they want you to know that they are off to the next hotspot to do exactly the same.

The dream of foreign home-ownership is becoming more difficult to sustain after last week’s events on the Spanish stock market. Shares in property companies plunged after it became clear to investors that there is not a limitless supply of wide-eyed Brits, and other Northern Europeans, to soak up the 800,000 properties a year being built in Spain. Those who have bought holiday homes in the country recently face losing money or, if they have bought off-plan, failing to see their properties finished at all.

I cannot say that I will be terribly sorry. Our national obsession with acquiring a place in the sun has been an environmental disaster. One evening recently, when I had nothing better to do, I logged on to Google Earth, homed in on Gibraltar at a height of several hundred feet and then worked my mouse the 600 miles northeastwards to Barcelona. It was a truly shocking sight. Ninety per cent of the coastline is now covered with estates of nasty little concrete villas and their turquoise-painted swimming pools. Even the few remaining virgin stretches of coast are not quite what they seem: home in a little closer and you can often make out little earth tracks laid out to form the cul-de-sacs of the next tacky El Dorado.

One day the Spanish will wake up to the horror that they have allowed to be inflicted upon their coastal landscape. Imagine if Britain did away with planning regulations and allowed nonstop bungalows on every cliff-top from Weymouth, round to Llandudno: that is what the Spanish coast now looks like. It is not even as if Derek and Vera from Bromsgrove are even helping to create lasting jobs on the Costas: once they have shut their doors and caught their budget flight back to Britain, their empty villa becomes part of a ghost town and economic desert.

Why can’t we enjoy going on holiday any more without thinking we have got to acquire a slice of real estate? It used to be tea-towels and trinkets: now we can’t get on the plane home without first picking up a property or two.

At least Granny wasn’t expecting to use the tea-towel she brought back from Benidorm in 1975 as her pension plan. Britons who think their Spanish villa was a sure-fire investment are about to be rudely awakened. But it isn’t they who have reason to feel aggrieved: it is the wildlife that has been wiped out to feed the Spanish construction boom.

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