Moving to Sunny Spain

Written in 2025 for Bournemouth University, Turing Scheme

¡Hola! I’m Sophie, a recent BU Graduate. This is my third blog for Bournemouth University as part of their Turing Scheme for international opportunities, so if it wasn’t before, I’m quite obviously into travelling and cultural experiences. After finishing my degree, moving back to my Swiss hometown (very briefly), I then packed up again (unsurprisingly) and jetted off to sunny Spain for a new life, career and personal challenge.

I first visited the buzzing city of Valencia in May 2024, and it charmed me so much I’m now living here. I didn’t need much convincing. To me, it offers the perfect combination of city life, beach, old town charm and modernism. The architecture is stunning, the weather tropical, and I can’t get enough of the Spanish relaxed atmosphere.

I arrived in September 2024 and moved into my temporary shared flat in the Extramuro neighbourhood. It’s important to note that Valencia is a real up-and-coming city, and rental availability clearly does not match demand. It’s easy to get scammed or ripped off, so don’t send any deposit before viewing a place physically and meeting the landlord/property manager. The real busy time for rentals is around September time, when all the international students are arriving. What I did personally was book a 3-month bedroom in a shared flat, which was quite pricey and more studenty that I would have liked, but then used those 3 months to view other flats and take my time to find a long-term home.

In August, before making the move, I started online classes on Preply, to start learning some Spanish and reminding myself of the basics. Then, within my first month of settling in Valencia, I decided I wanted to take in-person classes at a local school, to really accelerate my progress. I did 2 weeks of 4h/day 1-1 classes at the ELE Aleph school, located close to the Torres de Quart. I had classes from 10am-2.30pm every day, split between two different teachers, with homework as well. I really enjoyed working with two teachers and benefitting from their different working styles.

The biggest gap in my Spanish knowledge prior to the lessons was my complete disregard of the past tenses that I had never learnt before. It’s fun to live in the present, but learning the past tenses truly and obviously opened up a whole new world of conversations. Learning 3 of the 4 past tenses in 2 weeks was not for the faint-hearted, but all jokes aside, I’m very glad to have taken the classes. I made substantial grammar and vocabulary progress in a short amount of time, and daily speaking practice was really valuable to me. I loved it so much I decided to continue classes at the school with 4h/week for a few weeks. Studying on a regular basis with local Spanish teachers also allowed us to share opinions and perspectives of cultural traditions, habits and norms. It was both interesting and useful for me to get more of an insight into the Spanish way of life here.

Personally, I do think that learning the language of your residing country is extremely important to your life there, both socially and culturally, but also professionally. It shows a motivation to integrate to local life and connect with the locals, and also a respect for their culture and language. Yes, a lot speak English, but one should never assume that everyone will speak English in a non-English speaking country. And if you’re interested in local jobs, it undeniably is important.

Learning Spanish has also helped me immensely with administrative tasks and documentation. Moving to Spain is not easy, even as a European, and comes with a lot of obstacles. Understanding how the system works, which documents you need, and how to get them, will be very challenging without a bit of Spanish knowledge. Government websites are either available in Spanish or Catalan, most processes need to be carried out in-person, which means in-person interactions with a non-English speaker, and you will most definitely one day or another have to make phone calls in Spanish. Make the effort to learn some basics, you’ll thank yourself later.

My classes are now over, I have found my long-term home in the trendy neighbourhood of Russafa, and am now settled here as a freelancer in Marketing. After reflecting on my first few months here, I would say my biggest cultural challenge would be how laid-back everything is here. When it comes to relaxing on a sunny terrace with some tapas – great! But when it comes to waiting for an appointment (which seems to always take over an hour), or for a bus (which seems to just never turn up), it can be frustrating. But after all I’m Swiss, and when it comes to timeliness, we’re not easily pleased. Nonetheless, I’m very grateful for my life in Valencia, and am very glad I took the leap of faith to move here.