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For a century and a half, the defining fact about Galicia was who left it. Starting in the 1850s, waves of Galicians crossed the Atlantic to Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, driven out by land so fragmented through inheritance that a family plot often could not feed the family that owned it. By the early 1900s the numbers were large enough that “gallego” became, in parts of Latin America, simply the word for a Spaniard. A second wave followed the Civil War, and a third left for Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands in the Franco decades, once Latin America’s own economies stopped being the obvious escape route. Villages across the region emptied out generation by generation, and that emptying is the single biggest reason rural Galicia looks the way it does today: beautiful, sparsely populated, dotted with houses that belong to families now scattered across three continents.
We mention all of that because we think it is impossible to understand what is happening in Galicia right now without it. The story people tell about this region dying villages, an ageing population, young people gone to Madrid or abroad — is true, but it is also, quietly, starting to have a second half.
The most visible part of that second half is return migration. Descendants of the people who left in the 1950s and ’60s are, in real if still modest numbers, coming back. Spain has legal pathways specifically for this — nationality and residency provisions aimed at emigrants and their children and grandchildren — and they make the return easier than most people assume. We know families here whose presence traces directly back to a grandparent who left for Caracas or Zürich decades ago and whose grandchildren decided, for reasons ranging from retirement to remote work to simple pull toward a place they’d only heard about, to close the loop.
The second part is less historical and more contemporary: people with no Galician ancestry at all, choosing to move here anyway. Remote work has done more for this than any policy. A decent internet connection and the ability to work from anywhere has made a region that used to only make sense if you were born here suddenly viable for people who weren’t us included. Property that would be unaffordable in Amsterdam or Berlin is, here, within reach, and the trade-off slower pace, more distance from services, real winters with real firewood reads as a feature rather than a defect to the kind of person who goes looking for it.
Domestic migration matters here too, and is arguably the least reported of the three. Spanish buyers from Madrid and other cities have been rediscovering areas like the Ribeira Sacra, partly for tourism and partly for second homes, in a shift that has picked up noticeably in the past few years. That is not the same as permanent settlement, but it is the same underlying reversal: a region people used to leave is now a region people are choosing.
None of this erases the demographic reality. Galicia is still one of Spain’s oldest regions by population, rural depopulation has not stopped, and one Dutch couple with a drone and a WordPress site does not constitute a trend. But the direction of travel is genuinely different than it was for most of the last 150 years, and if you are considering the move yourself, it is worth knowing you are not a strange exception to the region’s history. You are, in a small way, part of the same story finally running the other direction.
