Celebrations Are the Map: Why Remote Workers in Galicia Learn Belonging at the Table
If you want to understand how Galicia really works as a place to live and work remotely, don’t start with coworkings or visa threads. Start with the holiday table.
That’s the heart of what I tried to capture when I wrote about how Galicia lives its holiday season, and about the first Christmas I remember here: running up and down my great-uncle Manolo’s hallway while my family moved in and out of the kitchen like a well-rehearsed ballet. The food seemed endless, the talking even more so, and the message underneath it all was simple: joy does not hurry here.
From that lived experience came three things that matter a lot if you’re a remote worker trying to find your place in Galicia: a conviction that cultural celebrations are your best integration strategy; a Holiday Primer that explains what actually happens here in December and early January, and why; and a Holiday Shopping Guide that answers a very Galician question: who is making, creating and sharing the things that keep this region and the people in it alive and thriving?
Remote work is the context. Celebration is the curriculum.
The holiday season in Galicia doesn’t flip on with one switch and off with another. It unfolds slowly, from the first Belén that appears in a living room to the quiet Sunday after the Three Kings when everyone finally exhales. Families and chosen families return to the same tables, tell the same stories, cook the same dishes, almost as if they’re checking that the world is still in order. If you’re working remotely from here, especially if you come from a faster, more transactional city, that rhythm can be disorienting at first. Everyone seems to know where to be and when. You are still figuring out how to ask for caldo properly, and suddenly the conversation is about O Apalpador, Holy Innocents, Cabalgatas, tardeos, twelve grapes at midnight, and a second round of gifts in January.
The Holiday Primer exists because of that gap. It isn’t a brochure; it’s a friendly cheat-sheet for social cues. It explains why Christmas Eve carries a hushed, almost sacred tone, why New Year’s Eve seems to have two acts – the late-afternoon bar circuit and then the long family dinner that spills well past midnight – why January 6th holds such emotional weight here, and why the Belén, not the tree, is the gravitational center in so many homes. For someone working remotely, that context is not trivial. It tells you when people will be present or completely unavailable, which invitations are light and which are huge, when it’s time to step forward and when it’s better to give space. It tells you that if someone invites you to a family meal, that is not casual. And it tells you that showing up on the morning of Reyes with a roscón and a simple, thoughtful gift says: I know this day matters here. I’m paying attention.
That’s the line between “I live here” and “I’m trying to belong here.”
If you watch the table carefully, you begin to see the pattern. The structure repeats like a familiar melody: little aperitivos appearing as if from nowhere, seafood that most people elsewhere would consider a main course, fish that quietly arrives afterward, meat that officially ends the “meal,” desserts that refuse to be singular, coffee, licores, and then sobremesa that drifts and drifts. From a remote-work perspective, that table is also a very analogue networking space, even if no one would ever call it that. You find yourself sitting next to someone’s cousin who has just launched a project in another EU country, across from a neighbour who runs a small local business that could be a client or collaborator, down the table from someone who has just moved back after years abroad and is now building something new.
You start to see that here, a lot of professional trust is still built in deeply personal spaces: at tables, during late-afternoon drinks, on cold walks after over-full meals when someone finally asks, “So, what is it you do, exactly?” For remote workers used to thinking of networking as something that happens on LinkedIn, this is an adjustment. The holiday season becomes a compact, high-intensity training in the local code.
The Shopping Guide grows out of another reality of this time of year. Gift-giving in Galicia is changing. There are now two clear rounds – Papá Noel and the Magi- and with them and O Apalpador riding on their heels, the familiar pressure to keep up with commercial cycles, add another big-ticket item, match what classmates or cousins receive. At the same time, there is a very strong counter-current of people who want to give fewer things and more meaningful ones, grounded in place and story. The guide is a response to that tension, and it happens to be an incredible resource if you are a remote worker trying to weave yourself into this social and economic fabric without pretending you were always here.
It’s full of real people you can actually meet.
There is Silvia Piñeiro, for example, who works in real estate out of Vilanova de Arousa. She specialises in guiding buyers and sellers through the emotional and logistical mess of moving, investing, or selling, and she does it with particular care for international clients trying to make sense of the Galician market. For many newcomers, she is one of the first practical bridges between the idea of living here and the reality of finding a home that fits.
In Sabarís, in the south, Fátima of Lucky’s Bakes Ceramics throws clay on a wheel that once turned in Miami. Her studio now looks out on hills and sea, and each collection she creates carries the name or spirit of a Galician mountain or beach. Her pieces are meant to be used, not stared at – mugs that become morning rituals, bowls that show up on holiday tables, objects that quietly say: I live here now too.
Up in A Coruña, Katie from Solas Relaxation is thinking about the next generation altogether. She designs a children’s mindfulness diary and a wooden “breathing dice” that turn emotional regulation into play. For remote workers raising kids here, her work is a reminder that you don’t have to choose between ambition and softness, or between building a life in a new country and giving your child tools to feel safe in it.
In a small, very green village outside Pontevedra, painter and drawer Sal Higgens opens her studio door. After more than twenty years of painting around the world, she’s settled here with her family, selling prints of her drawings and inviting beginners into drawing sessions that are really about finding your own line and voice. For someone newly arrived, an afternoon in her studio is as much about seeing the Galician landscape through an artist’s eyes as it is about sketching.
In Santiago de Compostela, Ukrainian-born artist Alisa Proskura gathers bits of Galicia itself – gorse and hydrangea blooms, Atlantic seaweed, tiny minerals – and suspends them in eco-friendly resin to make jewellery. Each piece quite literally holds a part of this land. Galicians buy her work for themselves; people who have fallen in love with Galicia buy it so they can carry a fragment of it wherever they go.
Some of the guide’s contributors work in spaces that are less tangible than clay or resin but just as important for anyone living and working here. In Vigo, therapist and yoga instructor Lihi Belleli offers online emotional therapy and yoga classes in English, drawing on fifteen years of experience to help people navigate transitions, anxiety, and the question of who they want to be in this new chapter. From the Ourense area, Galician-Cuban-American psychologist Dr RB Hernandez offers Jungian-inspired coaching sessions over Zoom, inviting people into deeper self-understanding at a donation-based rate that feels almost like a gift back to the community.
Others work through creativity and craft. In Vigo, Susi of Susi Mosaicos runs mosaic workshops where children, adults, and families spend three hours turning tiny pieces into something whole. It’s the kind of experience that makes sense in Galicia: slow, colourful, social, tactile. Not far away, Glenda of Ampersand Encuadernación binds notebooks by hand in a little space in Vigo, combining screen printing, cyanotype, bookbinding, and her graphic design background so that each notebook becomes a one-off space for someone’s ideas or drawings.
There are image-makers, too, whose work quietly shapes how Galicia sees itself and how the world sees Galicia. Photographer and writer Rocío De Prado of Ro DPrado Gallery in Vigo works at the intersection of heritage, story, and image, and runs a photography workshop for women over 45 navigating the menopausal transition, using the camera as a mirror and a tool for rewriting your own story. On the coast, in Cangas, landscape photographer Freddy Enguix prints fine art frames of Galician and European vistas, helping people who can’t always travel feel connected to the places he visits.
And then, in the background of it all, there are the retreats, the classes, the quiet hours where people are held rather than hurried. These are the kinds of offerings that don’t always show up in “best remote work destinations” lists, but they shape whether a person feels resourced enough to stay.
None of these stories is theoretical. They’re all in the guide, with faces and contact details and price ranges and, more importantly, the reasons why each person does what they do. For a remote worker, this is more than a directory. It’s a ready-made network of humans who are already invested in Galicia’s future and who are, in their own ways, experts in staying put and doing the slow work that gives a place texture.
Integration here is not about becoming Galician overnight. It’s about developing enough cultural literacy to move through the year with some fluency. You start to understand that when someone insists you eat more, it is affection, not policing. You recognise that sobremesa is not dead time; it’s where intimacy and real conversation happen. You realise that the stillness of January 1st is not a lack of imagination but a collective pause built into the year.
From a remote-work lens, this literacy is a professional skill and a life skill. It helps you time your meetings and launches with some respect for local rhythms. It helps you understand why your collaborators might be mentally elsewhere in the week of the Cabalgata. More importantly, it stops you from building a life that is technically based in Galicia but emotionally floating in some other city or country.
The Holiday Primer, the Shopping Guide, and the stories I tell through LiveGalicia are all trying to do the same thing: pull the curtain back on how this place feels from the inside, so remote workers, returnees, and newcomers don’t have to guess alone. They are not a campaign. They are an invitation.
If you’re reading this from somewhere else in Europe, wondering where to base yourself next, you will find plenty of comparisons of taxes, rents, and visa options. Those matter. But if you choose Galicia – or any place, really – what will determine whether you thrive won’t just be paperwork or broadband. It will be whether you are willing to let local celebrations be part of your integration plan, whether you see the creators and professionals around you as neighbours and potential collaborators rather than background service providers, and whether you allow yourself to be changed, even a little, by how this place understands time, generosity, and joy.
The Galicia Holiday Primer and Galicia Holiday Shopping Guide grew out of my own life here and the work we do through LiveGalicia. They are small, practical tools for something very big: learning how to live – and work – in a way that feels less remote.
Because in Galicia, belonging doesn’t happen in theory. It happens at the table, in the studio, in the workshop, on the winter street, one conversation at a time.
Contributor
Ángela-Jo Touza-Medina, M.A., LL.M., is a global nonprofit and social impact consultant, workforce strategy and DEIB advocate, as well as a recognised immigrant integration facilitator. She is the author of A Single Mother by Choice: A Journal for Solo Moms and founder of LiveGalicia, a platform supporting digital nomads, foreign residents, and returning Galicians as they build lives rooted in community and belonging. With over twenty years of experience guiding organisations and community-driven initiatives, her work sits at the intersection of equity, migration, and organisational resilience.