Why I left Spain but you might like it

I left Spain after living there for several years. Here’s why I left, and why my reasons might not apply to you.

I lived mostly in Madrid, plus a couple of years in Gandia, a small city near Valencia. The following is based on my experience living in cities among Spaniards. Life in the countryside or an expat enclave could be different.

In a nutshell

I left Spain after several years because:

• The people around me seemed intense and loud compared to what I was used to, and I never adjusted.
• There was more disorganization and scams than I wanted to deal with.
• Spain didn’t seem to want me there: Its taxes included punitive fees targeted at foreigners; Immigration worked so slowly that I was “illegal” for months at every visa renewal and couldn’t travel abroad without police permission; and some locals stared with hostility (I’m obviously a foreigner).

However, a Spanish life might be enjoyable for:

• Laid-back extroverts who enjoy vigorous conversations and liveliness in general
• People who look like Spaniards
• People who like a big government that freely spends on popular causes
• Gay people who are fine with the above–Spain ranks high in gay rights
• Retirees who have the free time to accommodate delays
• People who live in an expat area where foreigners are common

It’s probably not good for:

• Introverts who flinch at loud noises or yelling
• People who enjoy working hard to build something, whether a house or a business
• People who have a strong preference for reliability and efficiency

My departure from Spain wasn’t Spain’s fault — I hadn’t researched it enough. I chose it mostly because I spoke the language. I made a common expat mistake.

The details

I’m not normal

Lots of people say Spain is heaven, including expats who have lived there for years. Why do they love it, and I didn’t?

The happy expats I met tended to live in private houses, often in areas that have other English speaking foreigners. I speak Spanish and lived in city apartments, and my social life was mostly Spanish. I was often the only foreigner.

I was also running an online business in high-achiever mode, while many of the “this is heaven!” expats are retired and have lots of time to stand in line at the bank.

Finally, my Spanish and my mindset were Mexican. I had spent several years in Yucatán, a traditional region of Mexico where manners are courtly and the pace of speech relaxed.

So the following culture-shock items might not apply to you.

Direct, high-volume culture

From my perspective, Spaniards, especially madrileños:

• Speak quickly, with a sense of urgency
• Speak loudly, talking over each other and interrupting
• Skip a lot of the “buenos días,” “please,” and other social lubricants of Yucatán
• Have smaller personal space and less awareness of others, which can mean people seem to push you or block the sidewalk/metro door/escalator.
• Curse and yell more than people in many places I’ve been. All but one of my apartments had neighbors who regularly yelled at each other.
• Create a noisy life in general, due to louder speaking, louder TVs, a fondness for fireworks, and bad sound isolation in buildings.

Spaniards can be direct, which can be a good thing or not. Related to this is behavior that can feel like racism.

• For me this meant near-daily hostile staring from Spanish ladies of a certain age. They would slowly look me up and down as if I were disgusting. I would be dressed like a Spanish woman in nice jeans and a dark jacket, no makeup, fit, nothing odd except my height and pale coloring. The glaring was so blatant that friends noticed it, and it happened to other foreign women I knew. I’ve been stared at in lots of countries but not with the disgust of Spanish señoras.
• Some Spaniards would go beyond teasing me for my Mexican Spanish and veer into mockery of Mexicans and their supposedly backward ways. Some were also blunt in addressing South Americans about their race, such as asking, “Are you indigenous? You look indigenous. I can see it in your face.”

Online, I’ve seen Spaniards defend statements that would be considered racist in other countries. For example, one foreigner complained about being called a “negra de mierda” (shitty black woman) by a señora who felt the foreigner was in her way. Spaniards said the foreigner was “too sensitive” and that it’s perfectly normal to refer to someone you’re annoyed with that way, it has nothing to do with race.

Urgent inefficiency

In my experience, service providers and medical staff acted as if everything was urgent, while at the same time they jumbled up the works so the thing couldn’t be done quickly and simply.

• They would talk urgently as if they wanted to know what the issue was but interrupt me so often that it took longer to explain.
• Once they determined the solution, they would create a flurry of paperwork that would then get lost or be only halfway acted on.
• Then my job was to repeatedly ask them to do what they said they would do. The reasons it wasn’t done were many: the order was lost, the order was already filled (it wasn’t), the doctor forgot to send the prescription oops he forgot again don’t worry he’ll get it done at some point (it took five days, during which I continued to be ill because I didn’t have the prescription), the lab tested your blood for everything but the one thing they were supposed to test so you have to go back and bleed again ha ha of course you have all the time in the world to do that, your order had the wrong address (it didn’t), and by far the most common: you weren’t home when we came (I was home and they didn’t come).

The last one reached its pinnacle when I ordered a couch. On the day it was supposed to come, it didn’t come. But online, it was shown as “delivered.” The support staff said it was definitely delivered, didn’t I see it around, maybe by my front door? No, I’d notice a stray couch. The staff finally sent me a photo of my alleged signature on the delivery document. The delivery guys had forged my signature to get out of delivering the couch. It showed up the next day with no apology or explanation.

Lots of breaks

While it’s great that Spaniards can prioritize relaxation over work, I wished it were at predictable times. An example:

• You go to a shop in the morning, when it’s supposed to be open, but it’s closed.
• You can’t go back in the afternoon because of course it will be closed then for siesta.
• You might as well do your errand at the bank instead, which provides service only from 08:30 to 11:45. You stand in line for 20 minutes, get to a teller, and are told that the only staff member who can sign the thing you need is at breakfast. It’s 11:00. You wait. He drifts in at 11:25 and finally signs your paper.
• You go back to the shop and it’s still closed.

Not for achievers

My best Spanish friend and the writer Miguel de Unamuno both said that envy is a major force harming Spanish society. De Unamuno called it the “the national leprosy.” I see it in the approach to taxes, work, and achievement.

Taxes
Spain has relatively high taxes, and some seem designed to punish more than to contribute.

• The government imposes a wealth tax on assets over a certain amount even though they’ve already been taxed. You paid income tax when you made the money. If it pays you dividends, you pay tax on those. If it appreciates and you spend that, you pay capital gains tax. If you turn the money into a house, you pay property tax every year. If you sell the house for a profit, you pay tax on that. But that’s not enough. You also have to pay a tax just for having enough money to make you one of the apparently evil rich.
• If you’re not rich enough for the wealth tax, don’t worry, there’s the extra “solidarity tax” after you reach a minor level of comfort, because obviously you’re not showing enough solidarity.
• Spanish taxes also include punitive fees aimed at foreigners related to the infamous Modelo 720. When I lived in Spain, the minimum penalty for making an error on the form was €10,000.
• Finally, even if you’re not working and depend on a pension, Spain will tax your pension at the same rate as earned income.

Work and achievement

The attitude of several Spaniards I talked to appeared to be that individual achievement is suspicious or just impossible. It’s better to get a steady government job or at least get as much money as possible from the government.

• More Spaniards rely on the government for their income than work in the private sector.
• The government is often in debt; it currently spends about 110% of what it “earns.”
• Entrepreneurship is discouraged, and until recently it was outright punished with self-employment taxes that weren’t proportionate to income. Someone starting a business could pay more in tax than they had earned.
• Young people I spoke with felt it was the government’s responsibility to find them a job and that it should be difficult for an employer to fire them. One young graphic designer refused to consider a job from which she could be fired for poor performance. It was easier to just live with her parents and wait for the government to give her a guaranteed job.

Here’s a fun video that combines both the soul-killing bureaucracy and the barriers to self-employment.

Scams are common. I was asked almost daily for money in the street, sometimes by a person with a dramatic story about an emergency that I would see them repeat with another target days later. SMS scams would try to get me to provide my credit card details or callers would try to trick me into giving them private information. When I left, fake calls from “kidnapped” family members were becoming common.

Since pickpocketing is rarely prosecuted, it thrives, especially in Madrid and Barcelona.

Delayed visa renewals

No bureaucracy is efficient, but Spain’s immigration department was slower than others I had dealt with and resulted in me being “illegal” for months at every visa renewal. Here’s how a renewal would work.

• You submit the renewal documents one month before your visa expires, as required. Ideally, you do this by mail because going to an office requires an appointment that’s difficult to get.
• Three months later, you get an email saying you can now apply for an appointment to submit the next phase of documents. This submission has to be done in person.
• By now your residency card has expired and you are technically illegal.
  • If you were trying to get a job, apartment, or bank account, too bad, you can’t, because your card is expired.
  • If you want to leave the country, you have to make an appointment at a specific police station to get a document that will allow you back into the country.
• To continue your renewal, you laboriously log in to the byzantine appointment website only to be told that no appointments are available.
• You repeat this daily for three weeks or months until you get desperate enough to either:
  • Hire a geek at a locutorio to repeatedly log in for you and claim an appointment the second it appears (several years ago, this cost €300) or
  • Develop the tech skills to write a script that repeatedly logs you in and looks for appointments (what I did)
• Travel to the appointment, which isn’t really an appointment but a time at which you’re allowed to join the long line of other immigrants with “appointments.” For me the trip was a long one to the edge of the city and involved going through security and entering a jail.
  

  

• When it’s finally your turn at the desk, submit the second batch of documents and your fingerprints.
• 40 days later, repeat the trip and stand in a different line to pick up your card.

All done! It only took 5 months, during most of which you weren’t allowed to travel, get a job, open a bank account, or rent an apartment. And soon you get to do it again!

Some immigrant advocacy groups brought this situation to the media, arguing that it was a violation of human rights. In the news stories I saw, most of the reader comments were along the lines of “There shouldn’t be so many foreigners anyway. Immigrants out!”

Finally, I said, “Okay, I’m out.”

Positives

If you feel immune to the issues I’ve described, you can look forward to a great standard of living, especially in Madrid. I lived there for several years, mostly in Ventas, Chamberí, and Chamartín. What you can expect:

• Often beautiful architecture
  
  

  

• Lots of street trees
• Clean streets in most areas with smooth sidewalks in good condition
• Pedestrian-friendly life; you don’t need a car
• Beautiful parks
  
  

  

• Useful public transport
• Mostly trustworthy taxis
• A functional airport that you can easily reach on public transport and that has flights to many destinations
• Freedom from tourists: They’re concentrated in a small area downtown
• Easy shopping: If you can’t get it locally, you can get it from Amazon within days, sometimes hours
• Some non-Spanish restaurants, such as Indian and Moroccan
• A lively Meetup scene in Spanish and English
• A dry climate, which means you can easily cool off with a fine mist of water
• Okay health care in the private system, though they’re fussy with forms and often disorganized. My one experience of the public system was bad, but others give it good reviews.

I miss the beautiful architecture of Madrid, the clean-ish public transport, and the ease of speaking the local language. Otherwise, my life in Bulgaria is more peaceful and free.

Another view from a foreigner in Madrid

After I published this post I became aware of this video by an Australian who has lived in a suburb of Madrid for years, married to a Spaniard. He speaks Spanish and teaches English. Some of his points:

• No matter how well you speak Spanish, some Spaniards just don’t want to socialize with foreigners.
• “People just aren’t all that friendly” and this has gotten worse.
• “People are very stuck in routines” and “don’t like change.”
• “People live and breathe politics” and put you in a political box based on the way you look and what they assume your beliefs are; politicians are constantly trying to divide the country.
• “The job market absolutely sucks” and entrepreneurship has few incentives.
• Bureaucracy is bad and hasn’t improved.

My responses:

• Language: My experience was also that no matter how good my Spanish was, I could be excluded from a gathering of Spaniards. At some Spanish-only Meetups, this included me having to bluntly ask them to allow me to sit at the table. This was in stark contrast to how I was received by groups of Mexicans or other Latin Americans. My Spanish was C1 (“professional working proficiency”) and my accent was slight.
• Routine: Tradition is good. If you don’t like the village festival, don’t go to the village festival. At the same time, I did notice Spanish friends who, for example, insisted that every meal must be eaten while seated at a table, preferably with a tablecloth, and that just enjoying a sandwich in a park was impossible. The food also had to be a certain type served in a particular way that absolutely had to include bread and not, for example, a Thai curry with rice.

Spain isn’t the only game in town. Here’s a long list of other places to consider.

Photo at top: Madrid