How long is your winter

We have been told that the area has very cold winters, how long does your winter last ? How much rain is the big question? We don't mind the cold but I/we hate the rain and if we are honest we want to get away from the uk partly because of the rain amongst other things. Equally how many good spring/summer months do you have ? we can put up with some rain if we had a longer summer to look forward too.

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This is a summary of last year's weather. The spanish "Met Office" have a weather station in Baza and they publish their statistics. Due to my interest in astronomy I have been gobbling up their data for some time and graphing it.
In general the weather here is more extreme than in the UK. Summers are hotter and drier, winters are colder. When it rains, it's more intense (as you can see my the 40mm++ of rain on one day). 2013 was a bit of a strange year: very wet and cloudy at the start, a frosty night on May 1 (unheard of) and rain in August, too. But an averagely sunny year with 237 days of 75% sun - though that doesn't means the skies were crystal-clear, just that the sun was out.

in practice, there were nice days as early as February, when it was T-shirt weather until the sun went down (after that it got cold quite quickly) and we had a sunny Sunday when it reached 18° a couple of weeks ago (in January). Most of the rain seems to occur in "cloudbursts", so although the rainfall was about a half of what the UK gets (average there of 960mm / year), there aren't so many days where it's damp & drizzly. However the local soil, at least where I live, does retain honkin' great puddles for some days after rain as the drainage is lousy: so it does get a leeeetle bit muddy.

Land where we are in Galera is dry and sucks it up, we have to water the plants even in spring and autumn. T the roads however turn into rivers and tracks wash gullies out of the surface. Its great to see as long as you are not out in it and when we do get thunder and lightning is fantastic but it doesnt last long. If you are ok with cold its great.

If you want to get rid of the rain, then you are looking in the right place. When it rains, it sure does rain, but it is a lot less than in the UK.
Difficult to say how much rain we get as different every year. Can be nice and sunny in January. Even the cold is a dry cold, if that makes sense due to the altitude, doesn't get into your bones like the UK weather.
I hate rain as well, especially when walking the dogs, but can only remember maybe 8 or less occasions of actually walking in the rain in the mornings over the winter.
The one thing I hate more than rain is the wind, and we certainly get plenty of it in Fuente Nueva, think this winter has been the worst so far.

In the winter months it can be a sunny 8ºC in London and a sunny 8ºC in the Altiplano and I know where I'd rather be.      The Spanish winter sun is much warmer, even if the air temperature isn't high.  And it's sunny far more often.

The real plus point though is that the sun sets almost an hour later than the UK, plus Spain is another hour later because of the time zone, so today the sun sets in London at 1654, and at our cave at 1836, so that's 1 hour 42 minutes more of quality daylight, albeit at the loss of 36 minutes of daylight in the morning (London sunrise 0733, Altiplano 0809).

Spain should really be on Western European Timezone along with Portugal, Ireland and the UK, but it moved to Central European Timezone in 1940 to be in step with Berlin and Rome.