“I didn’t want an expat hell hole…”
Eugene chuckled, “Blunt, but you know what I mean, right? I didn’t want to be a ‘bad Brit.’”
Eugene Costello, a mid-50s Londoner, was telling me how he arrived at the decision to move to Valencia three years ago.
Yes, I assured him, I knew what he meant.
So much of Spain is already well populated by British expats, and there’s a self-acknowledged tendency for them to create enclaves… “Little Britains.”
Andalucía, with its famous Costa del Sol and well-known cities like Málaga and Marbella, is packed with Brits, with a reported 92,000 living in the region in 2022.
They’re not the only ones moving in—Spain has the fourth highest rate of immigration in Europe and expats make up nearly 13% of its population.
Americans are somewhat new to the scene in Valencia, though, with the city practically unknown to many on the other side of the Atlantic… unless you’re familiar with the oranges of course…
Indeed, Valencia feels nothing like some other Spanish cities that have a high foreigner population. It feels authentically itself.
That’s not to say there aren’t foreigners here—more are discovering it every year. But Valencia is a small city and doesn’t attract near as many expats or tourists as Barcelona, Madrid, or the southern Costas.
