Preparing the Girls for the Big Move: The decision to uproot our lives and relocate to Spain was not made overnight. We took the time to explain the move to our daughters well in advance. The goal was to normalize the idea, allowing the girls to process and discuss any concerns or questions they might have had. Looking back, we both reflect that it was challenging for the girls to grasp the full scope of the adventure awaiting them.
Language Transition: Bryn and Scout had exposure to the language through Spanish immersion classes at our US school. Still, we planned our trip to arrive in August, before the school year started, to help familiarize ourselves and the girls with our new surroundings. We enrolled the girls into a local language school, Castilla, to help them in the transition to learning in the Spanish school system and provide them with a confidence boost. Choosing the Right School: Relocating in the historic Albayzin in Granada, we were looking for a school that would offer a different experience from American education. We opted for total immersion in a local community, wanting to let the girls experience Spanish traditions and teaching methods. To be within walking distance of the family house was an essential aspect in making a final decision. We’re grateful we hired the “Your Year In Spain” team for all aspects of our move. Regarding the children, we had detailed discussions about their hopes and aspirations. YYIS identified Colegio Ave Maria as a school that met our requirements, ensuring the best educational fit. The First Day of School: The first day at school, we received a warm welcome from the counselor. We were reassured that the experience would be positive, nurturing, and, above all fun. We loved the schools’ more traditional methods, including limiting the use of iPads in class and instead focusing on a more interactive environment, which produced a positive experience for everyone. This is not to say that the school did not utilize technology. Instead, the girls had designated days to bring iPads, etc, and use them for specific research tasks. The girls eagerly anticipated their first day of school, which coincided with a festive welcome. Scout enjoyed a “Welcome to the Party” atmosphere, complete with school decorations with an air of celebrating the beginning of a new academic year. The overall experience for both girls was overwhelmingly positive. Adapting to a New Culture: A basic understanding of the language was advantageous. However, adapting to the pace at which the teachers were talking took some time for the girls as they adjusted to their new environment. The class’s interactive environment was very different to what they were used to and took a bit of getting used to, but the children took it all in their stride. Embracing Independence: We no longer rely on a car, enhancing the girls’ sense of autonomy. This liberating experience has not only allowed them to walk freely but also gain a sense of confidence and newfound independence as they explore the historic charm and allure of this picturesque Spanish neighborhood. They now embrace the freedom to wander through the neighborhood to buy pastries from the local panaderia. As parents, we have great joy seeing the girls happy and secure, fostering a strong sense of confidence in this charming town they now call home. Thriving in Spain and Transformative Changes: Our decision to enroll the girls in local soccer and basketball teams has played a pivotal role in their integration into Spanish culture. These activities have provided a physical outlet and served as a bridge, connecting them to the local community and making friends along the way. Together with their American roots and Spanish traditions, a unique and enriching experience has been created for the girls. The move to Spain has brought about transformative changes in the girls’ outlook. They now see the world through a different lens. An example is their recent trip to London, where they embraced the entire experience with a positive attitude, navigating new challenges. These experiences have undoubtedly shaped their worldview and instilled in them a resilience that will serve them well in the future. Staying Connected: Maintaining a connection with home is essential for any expatriate family. We recognized this and provided the children a phone to stay in touch with friends and family. They eagerly look forward to family visits, emphasizing the importance of maintaining connections with their life back home. Advice for Others For families contemplating a year in Spain, our advice is to resist the temptation of talking yourselves out of the unknown and get some help from experts on the ground. Once you step beyond your comfort zone, life becomes a thrilling journey; take that leap of faith with no regrets. Don’t let reasons dissuade you from embarking on this trip of a lifetime; you will undoubtedly create lasting memories. The supportive presence of Christine from “Your year in Spain” ensured we were never alone; there was always a helping hand or information when needed. We wholeheartedly endorse the experience!
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Spanish Digital Nomad Visa
In January 2023, Spain launched its digital nomad visa, known officially as a telework visa, joining Portugal, Croatia, and Greece in creating a residency option for remote workers from outside the European Union. Five months later, Spain is still working out the finer points of implementation with its own agencies and consulates, and with other countries. To help you understand whether the Spanish digital nomad visa might be an option for you, we’ve pulled together answers to some of the most common questions. Am I eligible for the digital nomad visa? First, you need to show that you have either a degree or three years of work experience in the subject matter in which you’re currently working. You´ll often see that if you’ve been a resident of Spain during the previous five years, you are not eligible for the visa. In fact, this requirement is only to be eligible for the tax incentive (Beckham law) and not necessarily for the visa itself. We don´t know yet if It’s not possible to change from a non-lucrative or a student visa to a telework visa. Freelancer or independent contractor—the eligibility requirements are fairly straightforward. You need to show that you have a steady stream of income of repeat clients or contract with new clients to cover your living expenses and commit to paying into the Spanish social security system as a freelancer. Employee—you’ll need to demonstrate that your employer has been in business for at least one year; you’ve worked for your employer for at least three months and; that your employer does not have a branch or subsidiary in Spain. Your employer needs to allow you to work in Spain. The main issue is that Employees need a certificate of coverage for social security. The employer is making contributions to social security in the country in which it’s registered Social Security Administration is often unable to provide a certificate of coverage for a scenario where an employee is working remotely from Spain as they´´ have to register and pay in Spain too. This is a reality for US employees but also for other countries around the world. Self-employed business owner—you’re likely to face the same challenge as employees regarding the certificate of coverage for social security but it would be easier to accept the Spanish administration requirements as you decide yourself. Should I apply for the Telework visa from home or from Spain? You can apply for the Telework visa from your home country or from Spain, as long as you entered the country legally with a valid tourist visa. Applying from home—you’ll first need a Spanish identification number, or NIE obtained from your Spanish consulate. You’ll then assemble the required documents for the telework visa (with translations and apostilles for all official documents) and submit the application at the consulate (at the same time you can apply for each accompanying member of the family). You should get a definitive answer in a maximum of ten working days. Telework visas are valid for one year with the option to renew (up to five years total). Applying from Spain—you’ll follow the same process (NIE, then visa application) and submit the same documents; however, you’ll have to set up an accredited digital certificate that allows you to apply yourself for the telework visa online. Each provincial capital has a several Oficinas de Extranjería where you can apply for the NIE and collect your visa, if approved. Telework visas awarded in Spain are valid for three years with the option to renew (up to five years total). The delay of obtention (or rejection) is supposed to be 20 working days. Should I hire a lawyer to prepare my application for the Spanish digital nomad visa? It’s not a bad idea to hire an experienced advisor to help you prepare your application for a digital nomad visa. However, be wary of someone who says they can guarantee that your application will be successful. There are no guarantees, as nobody has enough experience with this new visa. To conclude, it’s possible that Spain will modify telework visa requirements or processes as it becomes aware of pain points related to implementation. To stay current on telework visa requirements, we recommend following articles by The Local and reading postings by successful and unsuccessful applicants on the Spanish Digital Nomad Visa group on Facebook. The website of your Spanish consulate should always be your first port of call. Lastly, if you’d like us to connect you with a Spanish telework visa expert, contact us at [email protected]. We’d be happy to help!  First, do I need a Spanish phone number? There are two compelling reasons to have a Spanish phone and mobile data plan while living in Spain: 1. You’ll want to be able to access the internet with normal 4G or 5G speed when you’re not connected to Wi-Fi. For that, you’ll need a Spanish data plan. 2. While it’s true that many Spanish people are heavy users of WhatsApp for both texting and calling, you’ll still need to provide a regular Spanish number in more formal contexts. When your child needs to be picked up early from school, for example, the school secretary is going to call you from the school landline. 3. You’ll also want to be able to make phone calls to Spaniards, for example to make a restaurant reservation or call for a taxi, without paying fees or having your call go unanswered because it shows up as a foreign number. Second, do I need to keep my home-country number active while I’m in Spain? You’ll want to keep your home-country number active while you’re in Spain so you can receive SMS messages for two-factor authentication used to access your financial accounts. You may also want to be able to make free voice-over-internet calls to your home country using your home-country number. Two ways to have your cake and eat it too – Google Voice or dual SIM cards There are two good ways to effectively use your home-country number and a new Spanish phone number on one phone, depending on your particular circumstances. In both cases, your phone will need to be unlocked. Google Voice If you have a U.S. phone number and you’re able to suspend or end your U.S. phone and data plan while you’re in Spain, Google Voice is definitely worth exploring. The biggest advantage is that you won’t be paying for phone and data plans in both the U.S. and Spain. Importantly, you can port your current U.S. phone number into Google Voice and then port it back to a U.S. carrier when you leave Spain. One disadvantage of Google Voice is that you will be using a virtual phone number (even though you ported it from a regular carrier), and virtual numbers are sometimes rejected by two-factor authentication systems. Also, you’ll want to set up Google Voice in the last days before you leave the U.S. This is because your Google Voice account will only work when connected to Wi-Fi until you get your Spanish mobile data plan. At the same time, you’ll also want to ensure that you can access all of your accounts that require two- factor authentication. Ma French Life and Too Many Adapters both offer thorough descriptions of how to set up Google Voice and the different factors to consider. Dual SIM Phone Newer smart phones can accommodate two SIM cards at once, which means you can leave your home-country phone and data plan in place while adding a second phone and data plan. Newer iPhones function with one physical SIM and one eSIM, and many newer Android phones have a SIM card tray with two slots. Once you get the second SIM card set up, you can easily toggle in your phone’s settings between your home-country and Spanish phone number. But that’s only relevant for making phone calls. You don’t have to do anything special to receive text messages. For example, let’s say that your WhatsApp account is affiliated with your home-country number and you’ve selected your new Spanish number as “primary” in your phone’s settings. You’ll still continue instantly receiving all WhatsApp messages and calls sent to your home country number. The disadvantage of using two SIM cards is that you’re paying for two phone and data plans simultaneously. Setting up a Spanish phone and data plan There are lots of options for month-by-month Spanish phone and data plans. A plan that we like for its ease of use, generous data, free international calls to the US and price is the British company Lobster. This plan comes with a physical card that we can activate and mail to you or have waiting for you the day you arrive in Spain. Have more questions or want our help setting up your Spanish phone and data plan? Your Year in Spain team can help you !  Two deadlines give structure to your timeline. The first one is simple: school applications are due in March (in Andalusia and most of Spain) for the school year beginning in September. You can determine another deadline, for your visa applications, by working back 120 days from your planned arrival in Spain. For example, if you plan to arrive in August, you’ll want to submit your visa applications in late April or early May, because the approval process can take up to three months. Once your visas are approved, you have 90 days to arrive in Spain. The documents you include with your visa application, things like your criminal background check, new copies of birth and marriage certificates, statement of good health must be dated within 90 days of your application. So if you want to apply for your visas in late April, it makes sense to begin gathering your documents in February. Which comes first - housing lease or visa? You may not have a choice. There are roughly two approaches to planning a sabbatical year in Spain.
That brings us to housing. If you have school-age kids, knowing where you’re going to live will help you narrow your school choices. In that case, early February is a good time to look at properties with the goal of signing a rental agreement before the school application window closes at the end of March. Even if school registration is not a factor, try to give yourselves six to eight weeks before you submit your visa applications to find a rental and complete the paperwork. Depending on your consulate (remember, different interpretations?), you may be required to provide both a signed rental agreement and a nota simple, which is an official document that lists the owner of the property. Landlords will need time to request a copy of the nota simple dated less than 90 days before your application, and sometimes they need additional time to bring the nota simple up to date. There’s one more moving part to keep in mind. Not all rental property owners are willing or able to sign a lease with a foreign family to take effect six months in the future. Rental websites (https://www.idealista.com, https://www.fotocasa.es) can be useful for getting an idea of local prices and general availability, but they’re not a viable way of conducting your housing search because they only list properties currently available and the realtors typically only respond to inquiries by phone, not to messages sent through the site. Your Year in Spain team can help you find a rental property that meets your needs, as well as answer questions you have about timing and deadlines. You’ve done some research and decided that a sabbatical year in Spain is worth the effort and short-term sacrifices. You’re also convinced that your teenager is more than ready for this kind of challenge and that they’ll benefit enormously, even if it takes them years to realize it.
So how do you persuade your teen to go along with the idea? We recommend the following five strategies, which come from families we’ve worked with. 1. Put your best communication skills to work: First, the average teenager doesn’t have patience for long explanations. Present your idea as brief responses to the five W’s (who, what, where, when and why), and then encourage your teen to ask questions. Keep in mind that when you first share your dream of a year in Spain, you’ve probably already spent weeks or months considering it from different angles. Give your teen processing time before asking for a reaction. Try not to present your year in Spain as an irreversible decision. Listen to your teenager’s worries and concerns, and thank them for raising questions that need further research. Be prepared to honor your teen’s reasonable non-negotiable points, such as repeating a school year or losing their place on a traveling sports team. Finally, if you’re worried about not getting to lay out your argument completely or if your initial conversation wasn’t productive, don’t hesitate to write your teen a letter. The novelty alone will get their attention! 2. Offer an incentive Teenagers are on their way to becoming adults, but they still need more tangible and immediate gratification than you do. In fact, the benefits we most often hear from adults dreaming of a year in Spain—learning to navigate another culture and improving their Spanish—are too vague and distant to persuade most teenagers. This is where an incentive can be useful. Acknowledge the specific things your teen is giving up in order to move to Spain and ask “How can I make it worth your while?” What you ultimately settle on should be tangible, available before you leave for Spain, and appropriate for your child and the context. Just as important, the incentive needs to align with your family values. If your teenager’s main concern is staying connected with friends, for example, an appropriate incentive might be an updated phone or tablet they get in the weeks before departure. 3. Connect your teen with others whose families have taken a sabbatical year Communicating with other teens whose families spent a year in Spain could be appealing and useful. Your Year in Spain can help connect your teen with a peer who is currently in Spain or who has already gone through the reintegration process back at home. 4. Encourage your teen to take ownership Let your teen know there are many ways for them to shine before they ever leave home. They can take responsibility for researching specific questions, especially those related to their home school and extracurricular activities, and for getting their room ready for your year away. Your child might also want to talk with their teachers (Spanish, geography, history) about doing an extra credit presentation on Spain or an aspect of Spanish culture. 5. Make it fun! As soon as the cat is out of the bag, you can switch gears and start looking for ways to engage your teen in research and ongoing decision making. If your teen is a foodie, try a new Spanish recipe once a month to learn what the food might be like. If your teen plays video games online, encourage him or her to engage with players who write in Spanish (or at least notice what those players write). Get photo-rich travel books from the library to help envision what Spanish street life might be like. Watch soccer games with Spanish teams, listen to Spanish music, and watch Spanish movies or series with the subtitles on. Make or order in a favorite meal for an evening of brainstorming questions for further research. Do what makes sense for your family to enjoy this period of planning and anticipation. ¡Vuelta al cole! ¡Vuelta al cole! ...on the current Spanish high streets, sounds a lot more romantic than ¨Back to School ….’ which, splashed all over various high-street signs, used to inspire slight fear and disappointment when wandering around my town centre, on a wet-ish August day, in my distant school holidays. The signs were in every stationery shop, every big, bland department store. ‘We’re only two weeks in; leave me be’ I would think. There were only six weeks to enjoy in total. Being a parent in Spain, things are very different. For kids, the Vuelta al Cole deserves to sound more romantic; it comes after a mammoth twelve weeks of sunshine and swimming pools, of trips to see cousins and grandparents all over the country. More like my university holidays were, it’s a time when as a kid you may not see many of your usual friends for nearly three months and you’ve changed and grown in ways that require you to perfect some cute summarising anecdotes by the next time you do see them. It’s a kind of rite of passage and it happens every year. This all sounds delightful, though if you are a parent in Spain, it can be tricky. I must admit, June and July are easier since it is possible to be smugly booked up with Fun Things To Do fizzing all over your calendar: horse-riding, surf schools, mountain-based summer camps and more, and most will cover you from 9 am until 3 pm. But August, AKA ‘Spain’s scorching, 4-week Siesta’ is where anywhere inland grinds to a halt, shops are shuttered up and tumbleweeds fill the streets. For anyone unused to this yawning chasm of no-school or activities - while you still need to work - this is tough. We see friends, Spanish and otherwise, plan carefully to evacuate and each year we promise we’ll do the same but it never quite happens. So here we find ourselves as this summer creaks very, very slowly to its conclusion. In fairness, there have been many fun times. I’ll look back fondly on endless barbecues, holidays with old friends and all our many kids, very long beach days and that thing they do so well in Spain: spontaneous late evenings where kids are part of it all and odd late nights for them are maybe not the big deal I’d once been led to believe. In other fairness, for all the Vuelta al Cole signs, the school prep for September here has nothing of the military air about it that it had in my country. Being measured up for blazers and stiff black shoes? Our kids don’t wear uniforms. A mad flap to order all new pens and books in time? Our laid-back school (Gomez Moreno in the Albayzin of Granada) doesn’t even send the stationery lists out until the first day back. There is an enforced relaxedness here which does become infectious- maybe that’s how we’re meant to approach the holidays too. I’ll let you know how I go on that one. And lastly, if you’re living in Spain I wonder if, like me, this becomes a time where once again you marvel at your kids’ ease in slipping back into full-time Spanish when it’s something you can still feel so, well, foreign at, the times you use it, however long it’s been. If you’re new here you’ll likely have been spending endless days queuing in giant marble corridors or the beige, plastic-seated Extranjeria trying to cobble together impossible lists of documents to get the first steps of immigration all sorted to begin with. But somehow it all comes together. Each time it does, for all my waiting, there’s still a pang for my eight, six and two-year-old as I send them back to their respective centres, backpacks bouncing. Who knew, eh- maybe the weeks have flown too fast after all. |
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