tile or not

The paint coating is flaking off the lower part of our outside wall. I see other house are tiled up to about 4 feet from the ground.

Is tiling the only answer ?

That question is like asking how long is a piece of string. 

One would need to know why the paint is flaking off.  Maybe it was poor quality paint, a badly prepared surface, damp in the wall etc.  Putting right the reason is the real answer.  Covering up the problem, with tiles or whatever, is probably a temporary solution.

Traditionally, Spanish houses which do not have a damp course are painted with ’lime wash’ which is porous and thus allows the damp to ‘dry out’ and does not flake.  Plastic paint is waterproof so on a damp wall flakes off.

I suspect if the chap wanted to know how long a piece of string was he would have asked that question and not the one he did ask.

I'd be tempted to talk to a couple of those that have had their houses tiled.

all the houses in the village have got these tiles on. Same with the nearby towns St Pedro and St Javier. Problem is my outside wall is also a courtyard wall so it's pretty long. I'll bite the bullet if I have to but I was wondering if there was some coating I could paint the wall with so that the paint (looks like some sort of thick "snowcem" material) wouldn't flake off after a year or two. 

I'd be tempted to talk to a couple of those that have had their houses tiled.

I had one of my house's in Spain tiled up to about the four feet you mentioned, a chap was doing another villa up the road a bit, asked him how much, decent price all in, looked good, so he did mine.

The outside walls he did were all good, no flaky paint, no damp or mould, no damage to the walls inside or out, I had it done purely for cosmetic reasons... Done right with the correct colour tiles it looked good and I had a few comments on how nice it looked afterwards, have to say it did stop a lot of rain splashing dust marks up the lower parts of the walls because a quick mop round and back to good again.

If the walls in mind are in anyway damp or badly damaged then it's obvious this has to be fixed and the problem cured before you tile, nearly every villa in Spain is painted white and nearly everyone who paints them white has done so with the white paint you buy from DIY stores in Spain, and if you read the makeup of this paint on the pot you buy you will see this white stuff has a plasticiser in it so painting the walls with this paint wont cause damp, if anything it should stop a small amount of damp coming through from the outside, and of course it goes to say you wouldn't paint a damp wall anyway.

The house I had done with tiles still looks good to this day, about ten years after I had it done and as far as I am aware the house has had no problems with damp coming through.

John, if you have a problem causing the flaking, then unless you fix it you are almost certain to have the problem whatever you do. If it is caused by rising damp, and you manage to seal the outside, with tiles,  then the damp can only go one way, and you will have a problem on the inside of the wall.

If you have not done so, take a look at thread headed, :-  Damp and Condensation- air bricks and damp proof course
This message was last edited by johnzx on 18/11/2014.

If you have a rising damp problem, as I set out in that thread, you can fix it cheaply.   Then tile as Baz says for appearance and easy maintenance.  

The first thing you must do is discover the source of the problem. Flaking is usually caused by water ingress on the external wall and condensation or bridge affecting the inner walls. Rising damp gets blamed for all sorts of problems, but the cause could be falling damp – ie water falling down the walls from the roof where no gutters or overhangs exist. Penetrating damp is caused by direct soaking  as a result of ingress of rainwater through poor brick joints or window seals. Poor render can cause water to pool behind areas that are not bonded properly to a substrate and paint or other forms of cover will simply detach.

Spain does not install crucial components such as DPC,  breather membranes or vapour barriers so if there is no cavity in the wall, damp can travel either way. In the old days a system called inch-inch was used, before cavities and damp control was heard of and this worked on the principal that water penetrates masonry at the rate of 1” (25mm) of wall thickness per month so if a 12” + 4” rubble infill and a second 12” wall was subjected to water penetration for 6 months it would not reach the rubble infill between the two wall thicknesses and would dry out at the same rate. Any solid wall built today, because of the thin materials used can always be prone to damp problems. Covering up a problem in a wall will only lead to much more serious problems later, so find the cause and cure it before you undertake any cosmetic works.

Thank you for your replies. It has been explained by neighbours.....the wall sucks up water but is not damp. This is because the temperature is so hot, the water evaporates quickly. Certainly there is no feeling of damp when you touch it. Apparently when the water evaporates salts within it precipitate out and it's the salts that cause the flaking of painted coverings.

Solution ?...(not a pun btw)