After a while in Spain, you start noticing license plates differently than you ever did back home. Spanish and European plates carry a surprising amount of information once you know what you're looking at — and once you start seeing it, you can't "unsee" it. Here's a quick guide to what's actually on the road around you.
Solar power for a home in Spain is one of the first topics that comes up when you start seriously evaluating properties and for good reason. The sun hours here are among the highest in Europe, electricity prices have climbed steadily, and a well-sized system can cover the majority of a typical household's needs year-round.
What hasn't existed until now is one place that actually walks through the practical questions: how many panels you need, what it costs, what it costs to maintain, how long it lasts and what to look for whether you're buying a home that already has solar or adding it after the fact.
If you've been following along, you know that finding a home in Spain is not quite like buying a house back in the US. The agents are charming, the properties are beautiful and the questions you actually need to ask rarely come up on their own.
As we've been going through this process ourselves, one thing we kept running into was the gap between "interesting property" and "properties to make the list for final consideration." To help close that gap — for ourselves
One of the first things you'll want to do after moving into a home in Spain is make it feel like yours. You start hanging things on walls. Some art. Put up a mirror. Mount a shelf.
Simple enough — you've done it a hundred times in the US. You grab your drill, pick a spot on the wall, press the bit in and... nothing. The drill whines, the bit spins and the wall laughs at you.
Welcome to the land of concrete walls.
Everyone talks about what it takes to move to Spain. The visa process, finding a home, setting up a bank account, learning where to buy groceries. That's where the excitement is and honestly, that's where most of our energy goes too. But hardly anyone talks about what it takes leaving the US. What it takes to wrap up your life here. And the more we've worked through it ourselves, the more we've realized how easy it is to underestimate.
One thing we'd say to anyone in the early stages of planning: you can never start this too early.
If you've been spending time in expat groups or reading about life in Spain, you've almost certainly run into the word "gestor" — usually in the form of someone saying "just get a gestor" without explaining what that actually means or what one costs.
We kept running into the same gap as we researched our move. The concept came up everywhere — NIE applications, car registration, annual tax filings, TIE renewals — but nobody seemed to explain the full picture in one place. So we built the page to help others who were in the same situation.
We just put in a new page covering a topic that doesn't show up on most "moving to Spain" checklists, but will end up mattering a lot once we're living in Spain: home services. Things we'll need like a house cleaner, gardener, pool maintenance, pest control, handy person and more— the whole list of people we'll eventually need to find and hire to keep our new Spanish home running.
There were several things that surprised us as we did our research.
We now have two house hunting trips to Jávea under our belt— one last August and one in February. It was a great way to see everything in two different seasons.
One of the things we started thinking about when we got home was: what about pests? Is it like Florida where there are mosquitoes and snakes around all the time?
The reality, as it turns out, is there are some of the typical ones that one would expect, along with some that are specific to the Mediterranean climate. Yes, there are snakes. Yes, there are scorpions. And yes, a unique creature — the pine processionary caterpillar — that every pet owner in this part of Spain genuinely needs to know about before their first January here.
Leishmania in Spain is one of the first things any dog owner should research before making the move — and one of the last things most Americans think to look up. It's not something most of us have ever encountered back home, but in Spain it's endemic, it's serious, and it catches expat dog owners off guard with regularity.
It's been a few weeks since you've heard from us. That's because we've been heads down creating an all new US2ES!
Now with a ton more information than before, a new design scheme and a much more complete picture of how you can move to Spain! We've also added more detailed information about our journey as well.
As soon as we arrive in Spain, we’ll register our Spanish address with the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP). We do this for short trips and vacations we take outside the US now. It's just as important when moving for a longer period of time. STEP is a free service run by the US Department of State that lets US citizens register their location when they’re outside the United States.
One of the first things when we get to Spain is to become more fluent in Spanish. We're planning on going to language school, use apps and online resources to stay consistent. But to really be successful for the long term, we know a lot of that learning is going to have to be immersion—living day to day in Spain.