I'm a Spanish native. I was born here, I grew up in these streets, and I've never moved away. This site exists for one reason: a few years ago, an American friend asked me how to start the process of moving to Spain. I sent him a long, rambling email full of small things I knew but had never written down. The horarios. The way the panadería works. Why nobody pays for a doctor. The two-kiss greeting on the right cheek first. Six weeks later he sent it back to me with a note: "I would have paid for a guide that read like this."
That's all this is. A guide that reads like a friend writing to a friend.
There are plenty of websites that will tell you how to fill out the visa form, how to open a bank account, how to register for the tarjeta sanitaria. I have two other sites for exactly that — goingspanish.com for the practical paperwork, and globalmedplan.com for international health insurance. They are useful in their own right.
Moving Remote is for the rest. The texture of a Tuesday afternoon. The fact that la calle is alive at seven in the evening in February. The reason your American friend will stand on the sidewalk outside the centro de salud, holding a prescription, asking if it's legal that nobody charged him. These are the things you can't really learn from a checklist. You learn them by living through them, or by reading someone who has.
Every article here starts with a real moment. A specific anecdote with names of places, prices, sounds, and small details. I write in English because that's who I'm writing for. But the Spanish words stay where they belong — barrio, sobremesa, tranquilo, masa madre, médico de cabecera, vecina. Translating them would flatten them. So I leave them in, explain them once, and trust you'll catch on. You will.
The site does not run ads. It does not track you. It does not have a newsletter, an affiliate program, or a Patreon. If those things appear later, they will be honest, with disclosure on every article that uses them. For now, this is just writing.
If something resonates and you want to say so, the contact page is over there. I read everything. I won't always reply quickly — life in a barrio runs at its own horario — but I will reply.
Welcome to Spain. Or to the idea of Spain. Either way, take a seat at the terraza. The caña costs two euros and there's no rush.