You may have noticed that this blog has become “Mexico Cassie Goes International”.
That’s because in July 2022 my family and I moved from Mérida, Mexico, to Alcalá de Guadaira, just outside Seville, in Andalucía, southern Spain.

We’re from the UK originally but we moved to Mexico for reasons I’ve merrily shared with everyone, everywhere, for the past six years. If you’re new to MexicoCassie or aren’t yet bored with my stories, feel free to dig back into the early days of my blog here or score yourself a copy of my the updated edition of my book  all about moving to Mérida, which includes details of our move.

TLDR// We are from central London, our household had two salaries but one was being eaten up by preschool costs. Both parents were working hard and rushing around non-stop to ensure family time as well as work time. We didn’t want preschool and school seeing our kids more than we were seeing them. Add Brexit to the mix and we were O-U-T. We had six idyllic years in Mexico until in 2022 we decided it was time to try somewhere new.
This is my personal story and experience of moving from Mexico to Spain with kids.

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Why did we Move to Spain with Kids?

Our kids have been living in Spanish for most of their lives now. Almost their entire educational life has been conducted in Spanish. If we moved to an English speaking country there would be a good chance they could lose their Spanish, and what a waste that would be. Their dad used to live here many years ago and we’d always had it in our minds that we’d end up somewhere in Spain by the time the kids were finishing high school. We decided to come earlier (just before our older child moves to high school) to make their transition easier.
We are lucky that three of us have EU citizenship (politics firmly nailed to the mast as I flip the bird to Brexit) so we could move to Spain without too much stress.

Daily Life With Kids In Spain

A lot of Spanish life feels fairly comfortable thanks to our life in Mexico and the fact that Europe is our home continent. We recognise customs, culture, attitudes and, of course, speak Spanish.

Siesta and meals: For years in Mexico we half-heartedly considered moving our main meal to 2pm, here in Spain we’re trying harder because the siesta is taken so seriously in this part of the country. In our small town, between 2 – 6 pm, there’s barely anyone out, and shops are shut unless you’re in a mall or the supermarket. It was frustrating to begin with but now we’re getting used to it we make fewer rookie errors (like going out exploring over siesta time). Meals for us are really dependent on what’s going on for everyone but I’m noticing that we’re starting to eat our main meal earlier.

The kids eat breakfast at home, have a 12 pm tiny packed meal at school (in Mexico they ate their school meal around 9.30 am and called it ‘lonch’, in Spain it’s at English lunchtime and is called ‘breakfast’). The kids then get to enjoy the Spanish merienda in the early evening.

Kids: Our kids have more freedom in Spain than they did in Mexico. We have chosen to live in a smaller town where the roads are far less busy. This means the kids can walk to the shops on their own, which is not something we could have allowed where we lived in Mérida. They have bikes now and are learning to ride on the roads safely as well as taking off-road mountain biking classes twice a week in the amazing local park/reserve. They’ll soon be able to walk to school alone and even play in the square without us. The cafe near our house knows us – our kids have their own relationship with the churros maker (of course they do) and I love going in to order my breakfast knowing they know what I want and who I am.
The kids are very aware of their extra freedom and are grateful for it, and for the local park.

Weather: Europeans just aren’t into AC and built-in fans like North Americans. We do have AC in some rooms but we had to go and purchase stand-alone fans for every room. Our house in Spain has central heating but this is very rare and we are determined not to use it since gas bills are high and we really can’t afford more expenses.
Summer can be uncomfortable and baking hot in my area of Spain but now that winter is coming it can be wet and the mornings are often foggy. It isn’t all bad, the sun is kind of glorious, and thanks to our training in Mérida, we suffer less than we might. Autumn is absolutely glorious and even now, in mid-November, most days are perfect t-shirt or thin sweater weather.
We’re enjoying the morning fog but European rain SUCKS. We all miss tropical Yucatecan rain where it pounds down for a few hours and then stops. European drizzle can go on for days, making everyone miserable and everything damp. In Mexico my kids would love to run out and play on the trampoline or in the pool when it rained hard but here when it rains we just want to stay inside.

We are getting ready for winter. We have hot water bottles at the ready and know we need to buy more warm clothes (although it’s mid-November and we’re still not needing winter jackets). We’re sleeping under duvets, which is something we never did in Mexico. The kids really love having their own rooms (they shared in Mexico) and having duvets to snuggle under.
Shopping: In our small town we don’t have a giant supermarket like Chedraui or Wal-Mart. We have a number of small and mid-sized supermarkets. I alternate between Lidl and Family Cash and then once every few weeks I might drive twenty minutes to Carrefour. There is Costco here. I’ve been once, it feels more expensive than in Mexico so I won’t be going regularly because I just can’t afford it.
When we first arrived in Mérida, the fresh fruit and veg section of the supermarkets was poor compared to other places in Mexico. Over the years we definitely saw huge improvements. Now, in Spain, I feel slightly disappointed by the selection on offer in supermarkets here. There is far too much plastic used (points to Carrefour for the “give us our plastic waste back” bin I saw the other day) and certainly not enough emphasis on fresh and local. When I’ve chatted to people they’ve told me to find a frutería. I guess I haven’t found “my” fruitería yet since none of them call out to me or excite me with the quality of produce.
Of course, because we’re so much closer to the UK now we’re in Spain, there are plenty of shared foods and also imports from the UK that I’m excited to try again (hence our shopping bills being higher than they should be as we readjust to access to all the foods). OK, yes, I mean baked beans.

Bureaucracy

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahasob

Do you know anything about Spanish bureaucracy? Let’s just say that I’m not a fan. Nothing is easy. Maybe that’s a ‘nothing is easy…yet’, or maybe it really isn’t easy.

What have I done/faced?

NIE: Before leaving Mexico we flew to Mexico City to get NIE numbers for us all. This is basically a social security number that all foreigners, including kids living in Spain need. This was easy, cheap and a delight – fill in papers, walk in, pay, get sent a NIE a few weeks later. Yes please, thank you very much.
Empadron: When you live in Spain you’re required to register with the local ayuntamiento to say you’re there. Fair. Booked my appointment, filled in my forms. Went down. Registered us within a week of arriving. Only thing is, we still don’t have an official certificate because there’s a backlog and we can’t have it until we’ve received a call from the police to confirm we really are who we are and where we say we are. It’s been four months thus far.

Register with the police: As Europeans this is actually fairly easy even though it doesn’t feel it. We had to complete a few very tricky steps because we’re both self-employed (see below), that had me crying with frustration at times but once everything was lined up, I made an appointment for the kids and me via the national website (this can be difficult, by the way, as there aren’t many appointments).

I booked our appointment thinking it was for a week hence but realised at around 8pm on a national holiday that it was actually for the following day (my bad). I had a little panic, flapped around getting all the papers lined up and copied, found a photo booth for the kids and me to get passport photos done (we had Austrian, British and Mexican sized photos but no Spanish sized ones, of course). When I handed everything in the next day I realised that there is no requirement for photos for European citizens so that was a waste of time, energy and 15 Euros! I also had to run to the bank because apparently you pay the small fee BEFORE handing in your forms, which I hadn’t realised. That was stressful.
Anyway, yes, as Europeans, we now have little paper ID cards and we never have to renew them, so that’s great. The little paper ID cards, however, cannot be laminated to make them stronger or waterproof because that renders them invalid. Fun.

Tax: as a self-employed writer and editor (hire me, go on, hire me), I needed to register as autónomo to pay tax and receive all the benefits that entails. Registering is nigh on impossible without official, professional help. I know. I tried. After Col and I did everything for ourselves in Mexico I assumed we’d be able to do the same here, after all, we’re European and we speak Spanish.
No.

I tried, I tried repeatedly to figure out what on earth I was meant to do. It didn’t help that we arrived in the middle of summer when no one was working but even once everyone was back I still struggled. I asked a few gestors (an advisor who deals with Spanish bureaucracy), they told me they weren’t capable of doing what I needed – turns out gestors are particularly specific about what they do. Eventually I found someone wonderful who could do everything for me and hold my hand patiently through the bits I needed to do. She helped me get an electronic signature, a social security number and then registered me as a freelancer so I can pay all the money I don’t earn to the Spanish government. Phew.

School: Obviously school is a requirement for kids living in Spain. The kids had to be registered with school (public or private) before they could get their ID cards from the police. They had to have proof of empadron to register for school and they needed their NIE too. Phew. It felt like it would be a vicious circle of documents I couldn’t get with everything relying on possession of something else. Registering for school was actually easier than I expected, partly because I took it upon myself, after days of calling and getting nowhere (seriously, a helpline asked me why I was calling them for help at one point), to just go to the office in Seville and see what happened. I was lucky, a kind security guard let me in and sent me to the right counter where I could complete the application forms for the kids.

I had to pick four schools near our house and hope that we’d get one of them (we did). Then I had to hand those forms to someone else who entered all our info into the system. Then we had to wait. A week before school started we got a call from the school telling us they’d been allocated us/we’d been allocated them and that I should go in to fill in more forms.

What do we Think of School in Spain? Hmmm, I’m still not entirely sure how to answer this. School runs from 9 am – 2 pm and I do love the later start. Mexico’s ‘be here before 7.30 am’ was always tough. Now we live a five minute walk from school so we can get up much later. I still have to yell about shoes and water bottles, don’t worry. That never changes. I think the system feels more old fashioned and traditional than I’d really like but I haven’t seen enough to really know. The only thing that matters at this stage is that my kids are happy at school.

It’s hard because we loved our school in Mérida so much. To be fair, the kids have settled very quickly and easily, which says a lot about the school and how they welcomed the kids in. I have heard that the kids were excited when they thought they had two Mexicans coming so they were probably pretty disappointed when it turned out it was my technically British kids who showed up.
There seems to be waaaaay more homework than I would like but I am seeing that this is teacher specific as my younger child has far more than the older one.

Health Care: To get our EU residency cards we needed to prove we were in the health system. To get us in the health system I needed to eat twelve bats at midnight while reciting Don Quixote backwards. Kinda. I needed to have registered to pay my tax, have got my social security number (no not that one, another one that I actually still don’t have) and then have gone to wait for hours at the doctors’ surgery to be permitted to speak to someone in order to register. Even figuring out which doctors’ surgery was ours took a while. Anyway, I got us registered and now I have a year to get the final official number and submit it.

Have Kids, Need a Car

Need a car, right? Can’t go shopping, have adventures or see people if you don’t have a car.
This was actually simple too. We bought a second-hand-decent-enough car for only a little more than we hoped to spend. When you buy a car, you need a gestor to register it and you need insurance, and then you’re good to go. Only problem for us is the lack of empadron form that we’re still waiting on. The car is legally ours but is kind of sitting in limbo until the police issue us with the certificate of empadronamiento we need.

Thanks to this car we’ve already been able to get to a number of really exciting places including many small towns in Cádiz Province, Ronda, Mérida, Monfragüe National Park, Faro (Portugal) and Aracena.

Ok, phew, when I write it all down it doesn’t seem so bad BUT honestly, it was horrid as we went through it all. Moving country is never easy.

Language – ¿Spanish or Castellano?

It hasn’t been as traumatic as we expected linguistically. The kids slotted right in and claim to not have had any language problems at all except when my son magically managed to not understand the different word for ‘homework’ for the first week of school despite my telling him that homework is “deberes” in Spain, not “tarea” like in Mexico. He swore blind he didn’t know but given his poor record with homework and his strong linguistic abilities, I reserve the right to not fully believe him.

We asked (told) the kids that their tv watching had to be in Spanish for a little while after arriving in Spain. We wanted them to be used to hearing Castellano (Spanish Spanish) rather than Mexican Spanish before they started school. Ooooh, they were pissed at us.

I find that I understand more than I expected to of Andalusian Spanish but I am aware I need to get myself to some conversation classes pretty quickly. When we first moved to Mexico I took Spanish classes for months and during the pandemic I took a month of online classes via Lengua Y Cultura in Mexico City that really helped me advance but it’s time to find a way to immerse myself in this new Spanish.

Had we not spoken decent Spanish before moving to Spain with kids then ALL of this would have been so much harder. I guess we’d have had to hire people to do everything for us. I can’t imagine, for example, registering at the doctors’ surgery, or buying a car without speaking Spanish. It absolutely feels as if fewer people speak English in Spain than in Mexico. I’m fine with that as I have always been clear that it is our responsibility to speak Spanish and that we should never expect people to swap to our language.

What do we miss from Mexico?

Everything. Friends. Food. School. The ability to travel around Mexico whenever we feel like it. Mexico is the most beautiful country I’ve ever experienced and I feel its absence in my life daily.

What do we love?

Exploring Spain. We’ve already been to Ronda, Mérida, Cádiz, Sevilla, Setenil de las Bodegas, Olvero and Osuna. We’ve barely scratched the surface and I know we’ll really enjoy ourselves here once we get used to the fact that Spain is home now.

Final Note

If you ask my children where they’re from, they’ll be very clear that they feel Mexican. They say they were born in the UK but they’re Mexican. They remain firm that Mexico is home, that that’s where their friends and culture are and that Spain will not replace Mexico in their hearts (the UK, by the way, gets no look in). I think they will fall in love with Spain and will wind up feeling like this is home. They’re young, they’re European by birth and they do like life here so I’m positive that this has, for them, been a good move. There is no such thing as ‘the right move’, this is just one of many ‘good moves’ we could have made. Staying in Mexico would also have been a good option but this is our path now and we will endeavour to make the most of it and the opportunities it affords us.
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Recommended Reading

When travelling around Andalucía, I am using the following two guide books. My son was given the third book here to help him come around to moving to Spain. I’ve just read it and found it very accessible and easy to enjoy.