Digital Roots: How Remote Workers Are Helping Redefine Rural Galicia
Galicia is often cast as a place of endings. Emigration, decline, and absence were par for the course for decades, yet where this was once true, it has since become somewhat a cliché. Quietly, in hidden corners, something else is taking root. Remote professionals, returnees, and local innovators are weaving digital threads into the rural fabric, subtly shifting what “rural Galicia” can sustain.
This is not a story of rescue. It is a story of transformation from within, with all its contradictions, uneven progress, and stubborn hope. The question isn’t whether remote work can “save” rural Galicia, but whether rural Galicia can absorb remote work in ways that strengthen, not hollow, what is already here.
Decades of depopulation have left deep scars in Galicia’s countryside. Youth outmigration, ageing populations, and shuttered schools have hollowed out many of its 3,700 rural parishes. Over 40% of municipalities have fewer than 5,000 residents, and some have lost over half their population since the 1950s.
However, beneath those numbers lies resilience. There are networks of mutual aid, inherited land, and a deep connection to place. What’s changing now is the introduction of new tools: broadband fibre, satellite connections, and municipal coworking hubs that make it possible to work from places long written off as “too remote.”
The Galician government has taken small but symbolically significant steps. In 2021, it launched a platform for rural nuclei in abandonment, inviting municipalities, property owners, and potential inhabitants to register abandoned hamlets and unoccupied homes. The goal: to make visible what was invisible, to map what could be reborn.
At the national level, initiatives like Vente a Vivir a un Pueblo have begun matching urban residents with depopulated villages across Spain. The program lists available housing, employment, and even school options in small towns. It turns relocation into a structured, guided process rather than a leap of faith. Several Galician municipalities have joined, offering low-cost housing, agricultural jobs, and even modest “baby bonuses” to newcomers willing to settle.
None of these measures alone reverses decline, but together, they a framework that allows new arrivals, returnees, and rural entrepreneurs to meet halfway. Infrastructure opens doors, but community decides who stays.
The most interesting transformations happening in Galicia’s rural areas are not led by slogans, but by experiments — often small, often fragile - but deeply instructive. In Ponte Caldelas, Anceu Coliving has turned a once-abandoned property into a rural coliving and coworking space. The project now attracts a rotating mix of remote professionals, artists, and tech workers, many of whom collaborate with local residents on sustainability and digital literacy projects. There are no neon signs proclaiming “innovation.” Just shared meals, worktables made from reclaimed wood, and a slowly expanding network of mutual support. In Laxe, iSlow Coliving blends gardens, coworking desks, and community projects. Part retreat, part neighbourhood, it blurs the line between local and newcomer when a farmer joins a workshop on e-commerce or when a designer learns to plant potatoes.
Meanwhile, regional programs like Fixar, launched by the Xunta, fund micro-enterprises and entrepreneurship projects aimed at consolidating employment in rural areas. The approach emphasises permanence over novelty. Instead of subsidising short-lived trends, it supports long-term economic rooting.
Nationally, Spain has embraced programs like Holapueblo and Habita Rural, which help small municipalities match potential settlers with local needs. Galicia has participated through pilot villages in Lugo and Ourense, coupling access to housing with mentorship and work opportunities. Add to that the well-known platform Vente a Vivir a un Pueblo, and you start to see a patchwork of efforts — public, private, and civic — to reverse the tide of depopulation by fostering small, grounded returns. Not mass migration. Just quiet, steady repopulation.
After years of observing these patterns, certain dynamics stand out, many of which are both promising and precarious. When remote workers or entrepreneurs arrive with outside capital but no local relationships, friction follows. Projects tend to thrive when ownership and governance are shared, when local residents have a genuine voice and stake in new ventures. Cooperative structures, such as co-managed coworking hubs or community-owned colivings, can help balance power and prevent paternalism. At the same time, infrastructure, while essential, is not a cure-all. Fibre-optic lines and renovated houses matter, but without gathering spaces, shared transport, and viable local economies, digital work remains detached from daily life. A broadband connection doesn’t make a community: people do.
The harsh reality is that the very charm that draws newcomers also drives risk. Media spotlights on “the prettiest villages in Galicia” can inflate housing prices and encourage tourism-led speculation, pushing out the residents these programs claim to support. Platforms like Vente a Vivir a un Pueblo can unintentionally accelerate this dynamic unless paired with clear protections for affordability and community benefit. Fragility is another constant: many rural initiatives hinge on temporary grants or charismatic founders, vulnerable to collapse once enthusiasm or funding wanes. What Galicia needs is not one heroic success story, but dozens of small, steady examples that endure and evolve.
Even well-meaning policy often falls victim to fragmentation. Regional and local initiative -Fixar, Holapueblo, the platform for abandoned nuclei, EU rural development funds - operate in parallel with limited coordination. A more cohesive approach could multiply their impact. Aligning green transition funding with digital rural programs could, for example, support solar-powered coworking spaces or shared electric mobility in remote parishes. In short, the potential is here, but it depends on knitting together capital and capacity, infrastructure and inclusion, ambition and accountability.
If Galicia succeeds, it will not be by replicating Silicon Valley in the countryside. It will be by cultivating a rooted digital economy: slow, adaptive, and reciprocal. Imagine dozens of small, interconnected “nodes”: coworking houses in old schools, artisan-tech workshops in converted mills, farms using IoT sensors to manage soil, digital collectives reviving crafts through e-commerce. Each project is modest on its own, but together, they form a network of resilience. In this model, income circulates locally. Digital workers hire local builders, buy food from nearby producers, and teach skills in exchange for cultural grounding. Broadband becomes not a frontier of gentrification but a bridge for collaboration. There’s even room for humour: bureaucracy remains the Galician initiation rite. It’s a test: proof that those who persist long enough to register a project, pay a tax, or file a permit are serious about staying.
Galicia’s challenge, and its opportunity, lies in turning quiet experiments into durable systems. That means embedding rural innovation in the community, not in spectacle. It means resisting the easy narrative of “saving” the countryside and instead supporting the people already fighting for its continuity.
Remote work is neither saviour nor threat. It’s a tool — one that can either amplify inequality or restore balance. The outcome depends on intention, humility, and persistence. If this region teaches anything, it’s that transformation here never happens fast. The land doesn’t respond to deadlines or marketing campaigns. Change here is slow, cumulative, and relational. If remote work is the new migration, Galicia’s lesson is simple: plant gently. Grow slowly. Let roots form before the hashtags do.
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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.