Thanks for your reply GreatWhiteFish,
Malaga, or Costa del Sol region in general looks nice and is one of the places I've briefly explored using Google Street View a few times. Surely there are reasons behind the fact that some Russian gangsters own properties there. It might be a nice choice if I didn't play poker (Spanish pool is separated from the global one) and wanted to live in Europe for any reason.
However, Spain is a member of the EU and while that gives me the opportunity to live there permanently without any paperwork (I could even fly there without bringing my passport), unless EU changes the direction it's headed towards, I don't think it has a bright future. Why? Because it's headed towards a super-state where individuals won't be able to own a car (or it'll be super expensive to do so), their meat consumption and number of flights they can take per year will be limited, electricity will be super expensive etc. Sounds like a fiction but they will not introduce this new communism right away, but step-by-step. And the first steps have already been taken.
Obviously it's not necessarily like that the EU region will be the only place poisoned with this bullshit (check
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C40_Ci...adership_Group where you can see that big cities all over the world have expressed interest in implementing the new communism), but EU is definitely the pioneer so I'd rather avoid linking my future with it.