Moving from a busy residential area in the Netherlands to a fifteen-person village in Ribeira Sacra sounds simple on paper. In practice, it’s a long list of small adjustments, most of which nobody warns you about. Here are a few…
Most visitors to Galicia head straight for the coast or for Santiago de Compostela, which means Ourense often gets skipped entirely. That’s a shame, because Ourense is one of the few cities in Europe where hot mineral water still rises…
When we first moved to Ribeira Sacra, we started noticing them almost immediately. A tall stone cross on a granite shaft, standing quietly at a crossroads, in the middle of a village square, or seemingly in the middle of nowhere…
Most guides about moving to Spain treat a bank account as a footnote, something you sort out once the “real” paperwork is done. In practice it tends to be the opposite. A Spanish bank account is often the very first…
That headline is not clickbait. It’s a genuine warning, and one we wish someone had given us before we started looking at old stone houses tucked into the hills of Ribeira Sacra. We did end up buying, and we don’t…
The name Ribeira Sacra means “sacred riverbank,” and once you’ve driven along the Sil or Miño canyons for a while, the name stops feeling like marketing. Monks and hermits settled in these hills between the 9th and 13th centuries, often…
Monforte de Lemos, the unofficial capital of the Ribeira Sacra, has a river running straight through its centre, and it makes for one of the easiest short walks in the area. The Río Cabe curves through town on its way…
One of the things that struck us most when we first started exploring the gorges of the Ribeira Sacra was how often we found ourselves looking up rather than around. The canyons cut by the Sil and the Miño are…
What the Price on the Listing Does Not Tell You The price on the listing is never the price you actually pay. Anyone who has gone through a property purchase in Spain knows this, and Galicia is no exception. Taxes,…
One of the first things people ask us, once they hear where we live now, is whether it’s actually cheaper here than back home. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on which part of the budget you’re looking…
Within sight of our own house stand three hórreos, none of them still in use. One has been left to fall apart quietly, its wooden slats sagging and half open to the weather. The other two have clearly been cared…
Summer in Galicia comes with a backdrop most people don’t expect when they picture this part of Spain: wildfire season. We’ve now seen it twice, both times as smoke rising from somewhere in the distance, never close enough to feel…
Ask anyone in Galicia whether they believe in meigas, the region’s witches, and you will almost certainly get the same answer: “Eu non creo nas meigas, pero haberlas, hainas.” I don’t believe in witches, but they exist. It is one…
What Cl@ve actually is Once we had our NIE sorted, we assumed the hardest part of dealing with Spanish bureaucracy was behind us. It did not take long to discover that almost every online interaction with the Spanish state, from…