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In 2019, the much loved, gregarious, yet softly spoken Duncan Hulscher had just about enough of running bars in Amsterdam when he came to Alhaurín el Grande in the Guardalhorce Valley. Visiting friends, he could see how the change of environment suited him.
By February 2020, he had negotiated a price and bought the lease of Tia Rosa, a bar in the social heart of Alhaurín. But then, everything went sideways. Only having been open for 6 weeks, the COVID lockdown was imposed and all bars and restaurants ordered to close. Duncan faced losing everything.
Duncan faced losing everything
‘It took us two weeks, and then we started doing home deliveries.’ Tia Rosa was one of the first in town to venture into this side of the business. Now, everyone does it. ‘People were happy with the service, and I think we gained more customers who would later return once the restrictions were eased.’
Apart from the pandemic, Duncan didn’t find too many difficulties establishing his business here in Spain. ‘The bureaucracy wasn’t any stricter here than in Holland; in fact, it used to be less. Just recently, the Spanish government has become much stricter.’ At the beginning of 2024, Duncan was forced to close for a couple of weeks to undertake construction work as his one bathroom, already the biggest of all the bars and restaurants on Calle Gerald Brenan, was found to be a few centimetres too small and needed to be made very a tiny bit bigger for regulation wheelchair access.
Often the case with bars and restaurants operated by foreigners is that the clientele tends to be of the same nationality. While it is true that Duncan’s Tia Rosa is the most popular bar in town with the Dutch, there’s always a large mix of other nationalities laughing and revelling together here, the Spanish too.
‘You have to learn a little Spanish. You have to try’
‘Living inland here, you have to learn a little Spanish. You have to try. It’s not the same as on the coast. There you can get away with hardly learning any Spanish, and 20 years later, all you can say is ‘sí’ or ‘no’. But here, if you make a little effort, the locals will take you in, help you, advise you, and they will become your friends and customers.’
No other establishment in Alhaurín el Grande offers quite the same level of welcome and warmth as Tia Rosa, and there is no other host quite like Duncan.
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