Snoop, I also have arthritis and last year, my first here, I was thrown into the deep end as here canning is a way of life. With the help of a book and youtube I taught myself and we still have a good twenty bottles of vegetable sauces, passata, tomato sauce and fruit in the cellar. It need not be too expensive to bottle your toms and such, and they taste amazing. I bought a relatively cheap enamel pan which takes a large number of bottles depending on size (found a load in the shed, more came from the weekly market) I also have a largish camping stove which runs on propane and have it outside because of the heat. I leave the pan to cool before emptying it if OH is out. The veg for sauces are cooked on a barbie with wood before peeling as we have nowhere to put a free standing wood fire, if we did have we would use that instead of gas. The only time you need a canner is for meat when you have to pressure cook it (I think...don't eat meat) otherwise you either buy lidded bottles and get new lids from the market or even supermarket or bottles which use a thin disposable clamp on lid, the clamp costs pennies. It's probably similar in Spain, after all not everyone has a freezer.
What I have learned from last year is to do a lot more of things I use a lot of like whole plum tomatoes so I am growing more, less tomato sauce as it's a faff when you can use the whole toms, and to reduce the lutinitsa (pureed, cooked, aubergine, pepper and tomato sauce, great for quick soups, casseroles, baked beans etc) and more straight fruit in light syrup, like pears and peaches, delicious and much nicer than frozen.
Back on topic, the sun dried toms were bottled in cheap olive oil (hot) and the peppers kept as standby as I had frozen peppers whole and didn't always need them all. I thought of bottling them but I don't use enough so marinated them as and when I wanted them like that. This year i am going to sweet pickle/brine more veg as salady snacky stuff which is also common here. Even if we went back to the UK (heaven forbid!) I would still bottle and dry stuff. The main hygeine thing is to keep flies off and to make sure, if you bottle your dried toms and garlic, you use heat to avoid any problems.