At some point in every expat’s journey through Spain, somewhere between your third bocadillo de jamón and your first encounter with the dreaded Ayuntamiento, you’ll feel it. That itch. The one that whispers, ‘You need to start a business.’ Maybe it’s a beachside café. Maybe a yoga retreat in the hills of Ronda. Maybe you’ve got a software idea you swear will change the world, or at least solve one weird Spanish paperwork problem. Whatever […]

by Max Milano (Travel Writer). Valencian fishermen leave port before dawn to haul in the day’s catch, so there’s something about being out on a boat under the hot midday sun that makes them tired and hungry. It was out on the warm waters of the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Gandia, sometime in the early 20th century (around the 1930s) that a hungry captain aboard the Santa Isabel waited for his lunch. He […]

Let’s start with a shocking truth: supermarkets in Spain are closed on Sundays. Closed. As in, shut down tighter than a Spanish pharmacy during siesta time. You’ve just stumbled out of bed on Sunday morning (after a big Saturday night), bleary-eyed, craving an orange juice, and boom, nada. No Mercadona. No Carrefour. Then, after wandering aimlessly along the quiet Sunday morning streets, you may or may not stumble upon a shady corner store with a […]

By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) Spain and fiestas go hand in hand, like jamón, paella, and sangría in the sun-soaked dreams of travelers the world over. Hemingway started that dream. His first novel, Fiesta (published as The Sun Also Rises in the U.S.), burned the image into the world’s mind: bulls thundering through narrow alleys, chasing drunk Americans as they slipped and stumbled over Pamplona’s cobblestones. But fiestas in Spain aren’t made for […]

By Max Milano November 2024. I’m standing on the beach, but the beach is gone. Instead of miles of white sand and clear blue Mediterranean waters, there are now massive piles of debris stretching along the coast, fading into the horizon. The debris is stacked high in mounds, separated by lower stretches of rubble. It looks like the city bulldozers, usually here at dawn to smooth the sand, came early to build a grim mountain […]