The Woman Who Decided the Costa del Sol Deserved Better.

When Joyce first arrived on the Costa del Sol, there were almost no Black people here. She remembers it with characteristic directness: "When I moved here in the nineties, most of the people had never seen a Black person." She had moved from Madrid, having fallen out with a business partner and deciding she needed a fresh start somewhere beautiful. The coast had called to her since a holiday visit in 1992, when she opened the windows of her rented house and found birds flying into the living room. In Madrid, she says, that simply wasn't possible.

She built a hairdressing salon — the first Afro-Caribbean salon on the Costa del Sol. It was more than a business. It was a door. "It was something to be able to help me open doors," she says. "For people to understand, to know. Because it's difficult when you have never mingled with a different tribe." The salon boomed. Extensions, weaving, the works — none of it was common here in the early nineties. People came. Conversations started. Slowly, a community formed around her.

"I don't see it as a crime. I just see it like somebody who doesn't know. And lack of knowledge makes us perish."

The racism was real and sometimes brutal. She tells the story of collecting food donations from a local baker — boxes destined for her homeless clients — when another customer erupted. Why was the baker giving food to "these people"? They should go back to where they came from. Joyce picked up her box and left. She didn't argue. The next day, the baker told the woman what those boxes were actually for: feeding the homeless people of this land. Joyce's response, when asked how she handled it, is almost startling in its grace: "Your personal mindset will help you a long way. Because to me I don't see it as a crime. I just see it like somebody who doesn't know. Lack of knowledge makes us perish — that is what my Bible tells me anyway."

From the Street to the Shelter

Adintree Foundation was born in 2001. It started, Joyce explains, from a simple desire to go out on the streets and preach the gospel. What she found changed everything. "There was more need. Yes the gospel is important, but how do you preach the gospel? I found another way — showing the love of Christ by helping."

Twenty-five years later, Adintree operates a day centre in Fuengirola, open Monday to Saturday from 9am to 6pm. People come for showers, clean clothes, food, and something harder to quantify: dignity. "When you see a homeless person apart from their rucksack," she says, "it's difficult to tell if the person is homeless — because they are well taken care of. They can change their clothes every day. They have a shower. Everything they don't want goes in the bin and we give them everything new."

"We don't just want to feed people until they die. We want to bring back the dignity they have lost. The hope they have lost. That is what we fight for."

The challenges haven't disappeared. Joyce spent the first fifteen years of the foundation fighting local authorities who didn't want a soup kitchen near the tourist-facing coastline. "They call it the Costa del Sol," she says with a quiet frustration. "And for 25 years I really had to fight hard. Every time I found a place, they said no, you can't put it here, you can't put it there." Progress came slowly. A day centre was eventually permitted. A soup kitchen still faces resistance.

The need, meanwhile, keeps growing. Homelessness on the Costa isn't always what people imagine. Joyce's clients aren't only the chronically homeless — they're people who had jobs that didn't pay enough, people who couldn't afford rent, people who made one mistake and found no safety net waiting. "Some of them have a little job but the salary is not enough," she says. "So they cannot pay for accommodation. And you know — even just water. In summer, a homeless person in Fuengirola can't find a tap. The beach closes at 8pm. How do they survive?"

She talks about the future with the same clear-eyed faith that has carried her through four decades on the Costa. She wants more Adintrees. She went to Barcelona last year and came back, she says, sick to her heart at what she saw — people sitting together in winter just to keep each other warm. "If somebody asks me what your tomorrow will be, I would love to have more places like Adintree in so many other cities. So that those people who are less privileged can have somewhere to lean."

She pauses on the word "lean." That's what it comes down to for Joyce. Not charity in the transactional sense. Not food delivered and then forgotten. Something closer to restoration. "We don't only feed the homeless," she says. "We try to bring them back. The dignity they have lost. The illusion they have lost. The hope they have lost. We want them to stand and say: yes, I have come back. I thought I could not make it. But you people helped me make it."

"During Covid, so many people wanted to do good things. The Covid went and we forgot. What happened to that love? We are still here. We are still on this earth."

She asks what happened to the love of the Covid years. The mutual aid, the community solidarity, the sense that we were all in it together. "We are still on this earth," she says. "We did not come here just to go and that's it. Let us build something. Something people will still think about. That woman — wow. If it was not for her."

She laughs, a little. Not at herself, exactly. At the audacity of it — the idea that one woman, arriving in Spain with a pair of scissors in 1984, might end up building something people will still be talking about long after she's gone.

Knowing Joyce, they will.

How to help

Adintree Foundation is open Monday to Saturday, 9am–6pm at Recinto Feria, Fuengirola, next to the local television building. Donations can be made directly, by bank transfer, or through their website. For business partnerships or events, contact Joyce directly through Adintree's social media channels.