I don't think most Americans realize that moving abroad doesn't mean opting out of complexity. It just means trading one set of complexities for a different one.
The world is enormous, beautiful, and genuinely worth seeing. But every place you go has its own reality, its own tensions, its own version of things that don't make it into the highlight reel. When you scroll social media and watch someone living their dream life abroad, you are seeing a carefully tailored glimpse. Scroll deep enough into a comment section and you might find a harsher truth. Or you might just find rainbows and unicorns. It depends entirely on who is curating what you see.
Now that I am actually living this, on the other side of that screen, I see both sides of that coin clearly.
What This Has Taught Me About Empathy
This whole experience has made me far more empathetic toward immigrants everywhere, including the ones we used to employ back home. As a small business owner in the US, we hired people who were struggling with their immigration status whenever we legally could. It always felt like a small gesture at the time. Now that I am the one trying to integrate into somewhere that does not always welcome me with open arms, I understand how much that small gesture actually meant.
To be clear: our life in Spain has been, on balance, genuinely wonderful. But the version of life you experience in person is very different from the version you experience through a phone screen, and I don't think a comment section is ever a fair representation of real life. The people who leave certain kinds of comments are often not looking for nuance. They are not trying to have a conversation. It is something closer to pure hostility, and it usually says more about the person typing it than about anything I have actually done.
Here is something I have noticed. We did not get this kind of hostility in the UK. That tells me something about how immigration is generally discussed there, separate from whatever political debates are happening at a national level. I'm not saying the UK has this figured out, or that it doesn't have its own real tensions around immigration. It does. But there was a difference in how we, personally, were spoken to as immigrants there versus what we encounter online when we talk about Spain.
Why I Don't Make Much Spain-Focused Content
People ask me this often, and I want to answer it honestly. I genuinely love living here. That is not in question. But every time I post something about life in Spain specifically, the comments shift in a way that is hard to ignore. Some of it is hostile. Occasionally it is genuinely ugly. I recognize the pattern because I have seen versions of it before, growing up Black in parts of the US that were not especially welcoming either. I know what it feels like to walk into a space and sense that the temperature in the room has changed before anyone has said a single word.
I try not to take it personally, and most days I don't. I have thick skin and I am not easily rattled. But it does sting, and it does make me hesitate before hitting publish on certain content. There are already plenty of "move abroad" creators filling that space with the highlight reel. I don't feel obligated to be one more voice wading into something that consistently invites this response, especially when it isn't enjoyable and isn't the kind of energy I want to spend my limited time and creative effort fighting.
The American Accent Thing
I want to mention one specific pattern, because I think it is worth naming plainly even though I know it will read as a generalization to some people, and I want to be upfront that this is my own lived experience rather than a claim about every interaction every American has here.
I have watched other foreigners order food in English, sometimes with accents that were genuinely hard to understand, and be met with patience and warmth. The moment I order in Spanish, with an American accent, the entire tone of the interaction can shift. I am not interested in arguing about whether that is fair or whether there's a reasonable explanation for it. I know what I have experienced, more than once, and I trust my own read on a room.
This Is Not the Whole Story
I want to end on something more balanced, because this absolutely is not the majority of our experience here.
Some places have had a noticeably heavier energy around this than others. When we lived in Fuengirola, there was a real anti-tourism sentiment in the air, which surprised me given how much of the local economy depends on tourism. Barcelona had a similar feel, intensely so in places. We saw graffiti there with language calling for violence against Americans specifically. I photographed it but never felt the need to publish it. It didn't feel like it would add anything productive, but the sentiment behind it was unmistakable. Barcelona remains one of my favorite cities I have ever visited. The vast majority of people there were warm and wonderful, and I don't think that graffiti represents most people who live there. But it doesn't erase the fact that there is a real current of frustration running underneath the surface in certain places, and it is worth being honest about that rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
If you are American and considering visiting Spain, places like Granada, Córdoba, Madrid, and Málaga have, in my experience, been warmer and easier. I genuinely believe Spanish culture as a whole is rich, beautiful, and deeply worth experiencing. There is so much warmth, compassion, and emotional openness here that I think Americans could learn a great deal from.
The Bigger Picture, As I Understand It
Here is the context I think matters. Spain, like a lot of places right now, is dealing with rising housing costs driven heavily by short-term rentals, many of them owned by foreign investors or wealthy Spaniards who don't even live in the region. We looked at long-term housing in Gandia and found entire buildings of vacation units sitting empty, owned by people from Madrid who were never going to live there. And yet the frustration we encountered there was still often pointed at people like us, even though the actual numbers suggest the housing pressure has more to do with domestic wealth concentration than American newcomers specifically.
I'm not saying that frustration comes from nowhere, or that it's unjustified for people to be upset about their cost of living rising faster than their wages while their government struggles to respond. That is a real and legitimate grievance. I just think it's worth noting that anger sometimes lands on the most visible target rather than the most responsible one. And right now, given how unpopular American politics are globally, for reasons I think are largely fair, Americans are an easy and broadly acceptable target in a way that other immigrant groups dealing with their own version of this tension sometimes are not.
So if you do visit, and I hope you do, just go in aware. Be respectful, be a little extra thoughtful about how you show up, and understand that you may occasionally absorb some frustration that isn't really about you personally. It's about something much bigger than any one traveler, and it long predates your visit.
The Blog is only half the story. Moving a family across the world is 10% planning and 90% "figuring it out as we go." If you want to see the daily chaos, the travel hacks we use in real-time, and what life actually looks like when the cameras aren't perfectly positioned, come hang out with us: