I moved from Barcelona to Cascais in 2026. Two things drove it: I don’t like the direction Spain is taking, and the life I actually live stopped needing a city center.
I haven’t been in Portugal long, so this isn’t the expat piece that arrives after a week and explains why the new country is better at everything. It’s a starting point, written to be reread in a year to see what I got wrong.
Barcelona’s Trajectory Stopped Convincing Me
Barcelona is an extraordinary city and I lived there for years for good reasons. One of the best climates in Europe, the food, the architecture, the international connections, and a location that puts you between the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees in the same weekend.
The Barcelona I left isn’t the Barcelona I arrived in. Over the years I watched theft, street disorder and visible homelessness increase, and neighborhoods I knew well get rougher. Problems that used to be occasional became part of the ordinary texture of the city.
I’m also uneasy about immigration running without control, and about what I’d call a growing Islamization of parts of Catalonia. Plenty of people read all of this completely differently. This is my reading, and when I think about the next ten or twenty years and the environment I want my kids growing up in, the trajectory doesn’t convince me.
Trajectories change. A different government makes different decisions, and Spain could be walking in another direction in five years. I’m not predicting the country’s future. I’m explaining a decision I made with the information I have today.
Spain Got Harder to Justify as a Place to Build
My view of the world is simple. I believe in individual responsibility: you do your best, you improve your situation, you create value for other people. When someone builds a company, hires, invests, or takes a risk to improve their life, that should be encouraged.
None of that means opting out of tax or out of contributing. Of course we contribute. The question is the balance, and more than the balance, the attitude.
Over the last few years I’ve felt a growing political hostility in Spain toward business owners, investors, landlords and higher earners. Instead of asking how to produce more entrepreneurs and more wealth, the discussion keeps landing on how to tax, regulate or cap the people already producing. That’s the opposite of what a government should be doing.
If a 22-year-old starts their first company, I want a system whose first message is that it’s going to help them get there, rather than one that greets them with a wall of tax, paperwork and licensing.
And if your business is international, your capital is mobile and nothing specific ties you to Spain, eventually you have to ask what you’re still doing there. Barcelona used to have very good answers to that question. For me they kept getting weaker.
The Catalan Question Wore Me Down
There’s a smaller one too: language and identity politics in Catalonia.
I like languages. I enjoy learning them and I have no problem with Catalan as a language or a culture, quite the opposite. What wore me down, after years there, was how constantly present the linguistic and political question is in daily life, and the institutional push to use Catalan in more and more contexts.
There’s a practical version of this too. Public schools in Catalonia teach in Catalan. I’d choose private and international schooling anyway, but I want the public system to be a real fallback rather than a theoretical one, and that means somewhere the teaching happens in a language I actually use and English is treated as a priority instead of an afterthought. Barcelona doesn’t give me that. I don’t want my kids learning in a language that isn’t my main language.
Stacked on top of everything else it became one more reason to look elsewhere, though I’ll grant it’s the kind of thing that stays completely irrelevant to plenty of people who live there happily.
What Changed Most Was Me
The less political reason is probably the more important one. I changed.
When I was younger, living in the middle of a big city made complete sense. I’d leave the house and go to restaurants, bars, events, all of it inside the city. The city was the playground, and being central was worth paying for.
Then I had kids, and gradually almost everything I valued turned out to be outside the city. Mornings meant getting in the car for the school run. Padel usually meant leaving the center. Weekends meant the beach, the mountains, or a quiet lunch somewhere out of town. I wanted to cycle with the kids, drive good roads, be near nature, have space.
So I was paying a large premium to live inside Barcelona and then spending a good part of my life getting out of Barcelona. Getting out is its own project, through traffic and one set of lights after another, and once everything I actually enjoyed started with that same struggle, leaving looked obvious.
Living in a city like that means accepting expensive property, less space, parking as a daily negotiation, traffic, noise, and in my case a heavy tax bill. Those trade-offs are perfectly worth it when you use what the city offers every day. When your life runs on family, school, sport, the beach and nature, most of which happen outside the center, the equation changes. I was paying the Barcelona premium without taking enough of the Barcelona upside, and still carrying all of the downside.
Traffic Is the Thing I Miss Least
Traffic deserves its own mention, because it’s what I notice the absence of most. In Barcelona the problem was structural rather than occasional. Every route out of the center runs through a grid that stops you every few hundred meters, so a twenty minute drive was rarely twenty minutes, and the school run, the padel court and the road out of town all began with the same grind.
Most of my week now involves none of it. Next to tax rates and schools that sounds like a small thing, and in daily terms it’s one of the biggest differences of the whole move.
Madrid has its own version, and it shows up on the other side of the windscreen. Alana Moceri wrote about trying to get around the city without a car: Line 1 carriages hot enough that a citizen project now logs the temperatures, shared bikes broken at the stand, near misses with drivers on a network where the routes promised in 2008 are still disconnected lines. Only 1.3% of journeys inside the M-30 were made by bike in 2024. The city tells people to leave the car at home while making every alternative unreliable or frightening.
Barcelona is ahead of Madrid on that particular number, at 4%, and it has done more with its bike lanes. What the two cities share is that getting around them is tiring whichever way you choose, and the time goes either way.
Why Cascais
Leaving is one decision and choosing where to go is another. Portugal answered the second one before any particular town did, and from there it narrowed quickly to the coast west of Lisbon.
Cascais gives me, at least on first impression, most of what I now value: sea, beaches, sport, good schools, space, nature, safety, and an easy family life without being cut off from a real city. Lisbon is next door, the airport is close, and there’s an international and business community here worth knowing. The climate is still Mediterranean and the culture isn’t radically different from what I was used to.
The house itself was part of it. We took a bigger place in a condominium with a real shared area: grass, a pool, and enough room for the kids to be outside without being driven anywhere first. They go out and find other kids, which is how childhood worked in the eighties and has mostly stopped working since. Inside a city that doesn’t exist at any sane price, in Barcelona or anywhere else where space is the scarce thing.
A lot of the entrepreneurial energy here is Russian and Ukrainian. From what I can see so far it’s opening the cafes and restaurants and running the services, at a standard that pulls everyone else up and makes ordinary things work better. That microclimate built itself in Cascais rather than being anything Portuguese, which is one reason this isn’t a Portugal versus Spain piece.
It also suits how I like things done. The service standard most Slavs bring is to finish the job properly, where the Mediterranean habit, and I say this as a Maltese, is to treat eighty percent as plenty.
There’s an obvious personal interest here too. We’re a mixed Maltese and Russian family, I love the language, and living here means I get to practice the one my kids speak natively.
Instead of choosing between city and countryside, I get some of both. School run, padel, beach, a bike ride, a drive: none of them start with escaping a metropolis. When I want restaurants, culture or urban life, there’s Cascais, Estoril and Lisbon.
Portugal Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect
I don’t want to fall into the standard trap of romanticizing the country I just moved to. I’ve been here far too little time for that.
I’m certain I’ll find Portuguese bureaucracy that drives me up the wall, and things that worked better in Barcelona. Some of my first impressions of Cascais are probably wrong. Portugal can also change politically, fiscally and socially.
I’m not looking for a perfect country, because there isn’t one. I’m looking for a place whose particular mix of advantages and disadvantages makes sense for the person I am now and the stage I’m at. Fifteen years ago I’d probably have chosen Barcelona again. With a family, international businesses and completely different priorities, the answer changed.
A First Chapter
I can explain why I left Barcelona. Whether Cascais lives up to what brought me here is going to take time to answer.
In six months I want to come back to this list. In a year I want to write the concrete version: housing, tax, schools, safety, restaurants, traffic, cars, sport, beaches, bureaucracy, social life, how easy it is to do business, quality of life. I may well find I was wrong about some of it.
What already seems settled is that abstract rankings don’t decide this. Barcelona wins most of them and it still stopped fitting the life I have.
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