We’re moving to Spain! I’ve been waiting for a long time to be able to put that in writing. As you can probably tell from the recent focus of this blog, Spain has captured our hearts. Time that we spent there in the spring confirmed for us that we want to explore this country and culture in depth. We decided that we could only do this by living there and experiencing life as locals. After a long, difficult process we have received our residence visas and we’re packing our bags for Valencia.
The third largest city in Spain, Valencia is interesting enough to keep us busy exploring but will also serve as a home base from which to visit the rest of Spain and surrounding countries of the Mediterranean. We’re looking forward to traveling through Portugal, France, Italy…there are so many exciting possibilities.
Over the next few weeks, you will see a lot of changes taking place on this website. We will continue to shift our focus to Mediterranean food, culture and lifestyle. Because food and culture are inseparable, we will eventually expand to include recipes for Mediterranean cooking and more cultural sights. Of course, we will still be putting together fun, informative and delicious food crawls as we delve into this beautiful part of the world. I hope you will follow along with us.
Julia Eats 
18 responses to “We’re Moving to Spain”
Congratulations!! I look forward to following the adventure
LikeLike
Thanks! We’re excited to see where this next chapter in life takes us.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Congratulations. I was hoping you would choose Malaga, but Valencia will do for a visit!
LikeLike
Thanks! We loved Malaga and seriously considered it, but Valencia ended up being the best place for us to start.
LikeLike
Congrats! I’m excited to follow your new adventure 🙂
LikeLike
I look forwarding to living vicariously through you
LikeLike
We’ll do our best to make it fun and exciting for you!
LikeLike
Hi Julia, Valencia is a fab city – we spent a week there in the spring and have been in Spain for 10 weeks total over the spring/summer. We have been restricted by the schengen 90/180 day rules. We are looking at temporary residence visas (up to 5 years) as well. Do you mind expanding on your experience of the process?
LikeLike
Hi Glen,
We applied for the Non-Lucrative long-term stay visa, which can be renewed for up to 5 years. It was a complicated, frequently frustrating process but we feel it was worth it to be able to stay in Spain for more than 90 days. We are still waiting for our residency cards here in Valencia. Once we have fully completed the process, I am planning to write a series of posts detailing our experience from the American point of view. I’m guessing that it will be different depending on which country you are moving from. In the meantime, if you have some specific questions I’ll be happy to share our experience. Good luck to you!
LikeLike
Hi Julia, thanks for the quick reply. We’ll look forward to seeing your other posts. I am Australian and my wife has a UK passport and trying to find ‘accurate’ information is proving challenging.
How did you initially go about finding what you needed to do?
LikeLike
We started by checking the website of the Consulate of Spain nearest us in the U.S. for information on long-term stay visas. There we found the list of requirements. We then scoured the internet for information and read many bloggers sharing their experiences. We found the following two websites to be very helpful, although they were both written by U.S. citizens. Hopefully you can find some Australian websites with some searching.
http://www.billdietrich.me/MovingToSpain.html
http://wagonersabroad.com/non-lucrative-residence-visa-spain/
LikeLike
We have checked the Spanish embassy website in Australia and there appears to be conflicting information – surprise surprise. Anyway, I have sent an email to them with a query. Hopefully, we will get a reply…
I will do some further searching as well. Thanks for the links. 🙂
LikeLike
We won’t be far behind you! Our research into non-lucrative and/or retirement visas have us questioning which is the easiest/best approach. I look forward to keeping in touch! Alisa & Craig
LikeLiked by 1 person
Best of luck with your visas! It’s a lot of work but well worth it. I’m looking forward to following your adventures.
LikeLike
Congrats! My husbands friends lives in Spain. We hope to visit her one day. I’m looking forward to hearing about the cultural differences in your new adventure!
LikeLike
Thanks! It’s a beautiful country. Can’t believe we’ve been here for 6 months already.
LikeLike
Hi Julia,
I just found your blog today after my husband and I began exploring Valencia on-line. We are American expats like you all and moved to Spain last October (from Denver, Colorado). We having been living in Barcelona and decided to buy a home here. We have discovered that apartments here in Barcelona are small for the price we are willing to spend and thus considering looking in Valencia. We are both professionals, love to enjoy good food and wine and explore new places and cultures. I was hoping you wouldn’t mind sharing with me what part of Valencia you live and if you rent or buy. Also is Catalan (or Valencian) spoken widely there? I speak a fair amount of Spanish but my Catalan is “fatal”! We have only spent a few days in Valencia and were not able to explore much while we were there. I would really appreciate any information you could give.
LikeLike
Hi Monica – One of the reasons we selected Valencia over Barcelona was the lower cost of living here, although we never looked at apartment prices in Barcelona. As for the language, most public signage is in Valenciano (similar to Catalan) but I rarely hear anyone speak it. Spanish seems to be the preferred language spoken here. We speak no Valenciano and do just fine. If you want more details, send me a personal email: juliabwilde@yahoo.com
LikeLike