Even though Spain has always been our go-to location when it comes to holidays, we never really noticed a lot of stray dogs. Whenever we met one we would try to feed it but they usually ran away in fear. On one particular holiday back in 2006, while walking on a boulevard, we came across a man who was pushing a shopping cart containing 2 dogs and some of his belongings. He was homeless and the dogs were malnourished. We asked him if he needed any food or money. He said he didn’t need anything but begged us to take one of his dogs as it was too much for him to take care of both of them and he didn’t want to leave one behind. After thinking it through, we decided to rescue one of his dogs and donate some money towards the one he would keep so he would have some extra money to take care of it.

That is when we rescued Diego, our first dog from Spain. We took it to the vet and we chipped and vaccinated him and we flew him back home to the Netherlands to be part of our family forever.

After that, we started doing some research on the internet and found that stray dogs were more of an issue in Spain than imagined. We realized there were a lot of organizations trying to help these stray dogs find their forever homes and so during our subsequent holidays to Spain, we decided to combine our holidays with voluntary work for several dog rescue organizations.

Eventually, we applied to do home checks for dogs that were being adopted in the Netherlands and later on we started to help with the advertising for organizations.

In 2014, Simone decided it was time to move to Spain so she could help organizations on a full-time basis. And in 2016, her son Dylan also decided to move to Spain to support her.

After more than 10 years of experience working and managing other animal rescues in Andalusia, we decided in April 2018 that it was time to start our own rescue organization to support even more stray and abandoned dogs of Andalusia… and so, Álora Dog Rescue was born.