British digital nomads have traditionally headed to Europe’s big cities, but with rising rents and increased tensions with locals who feel they are being invaded, popular locations like Barcelona, Lisbon and Malaga have become less attractive.
Now, a growing number of travellers are heading to the interior of Spain, which has suffered from chronic depopulation in recent decades, in search of a more genuine experience of local life.
Helen McNamara, who worked for a company analysing customers’ buying experience in London, decided to spend seven weeks in Benarrabá, a tiny village with a population of less than 500 about 133 kilometres (83 miles) west of Malaga.
“I was in Bali and I think they are having similar problems with overtourism,” the 45-year-old told The i Paper.
She wondered: “How can tourism be flipped on its head and help local culture survive rather than destroying it?”
After asking ChatGPT where she should go, she discovered Benarrabá, where a non-profit initiative, Rooral, has teamed up with residents to introduce foreign remote workers for a skills exchange. The village, in the hills of Andalusia, had 1,500 inhabitants in 1900, but this number has dropped sharply as many young people left for jobs in cities.
The scheme offers a chance for travellers to preserve local culture rather than damaging it by driving up house prices or altering local habits to suit the demands of foreign visitors.
Ellie Pratt, 28, a remote marketing worker, spent two weeks in the village last month. She said she went to the gym with the octogenarian grandmothers, played padel with local people and painted with residents. “I just wanted to experience something very different from city life. The village was very different. And the remote workers were very integrated with the community, unlike other co-livings which were very separate or just focused on digital nomads alone,” she said.
Pratt, who is from Salisbury but lives mostly in London, said this attracted the type of digital nomads who wanted to be involved with the community. “There is a strong mutual exchange and benefit. It is not tourists popping in and out and not engaging with the people.”
The population of the village in the hills of Andalusia has been in decline, but UK travellers are now helping to revive it through a skills exchange with local people (Photo: Rooral)Spain is the most popular country for digital nomads, according to a 2025 survey by consulting firm Global Citizens Solutions, which looked at 64 countries. There are now more than 500,000 foreign self-employed workers in Spain, including digital nomads, a six per cent rise year-on-year, according to government data published earlier this year.
Of these, 26,660 are British and they make up around 41 per cent of the UK workforce in Spain.
Samuel Vargas, a 40-year-old software engineer who works remotely, had tried co-living projects in the Canary Islands and Morocco before visiting Benarrabá. “A lot of co-livings tend to be very insular. Just a lot of rich foreigners talking to rich foreigners, so this was very different,” he said.
Vargas, from London, said: “There was a calendar of village activities which they encouraged you to get involved with. I went to the gym with the older ladies.”
Spain has seen a boom in the number of digital nomads since it brought in a law in 2023 that allows remote workers from Britain and other non-EU nationals to get a visa. According to government data, some 300,000 people have taken advantage of the so-called “digital nomad” visa, which runs for a year but can be extended.
In Benarrabá, residents teach new arrivals skills like goat-cheese making, flamenco clapping and how to cook local recipes, and foreign visitors show villagers that the local way of life, which is fast dying out, is valued by people who are searching for a more authentic experience.
Juan Barbed, one of the founders of Rooral, said that after working remotely for years he realised that most digital nomads were looking to connect with the local community. “I went to my grandmother’s village to say hi,” he told The i Paper. “That day, I realised a very human lesson. What I was craving I could not find in other exotic locations, which was a sense of community.”
Barbed added: “You can ask for avocado toast anywhere in the world, in Bali, but what people are craving is a sense of something authentic.”
He said that many villages in Spain are dying, so “why not put those two ideas together: how both villagers and remote workers can enrich one another”.
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