I arrived in Alforja in 2023 — a village inland from Reus, in the hills behind the coast. The kind of place where you know the baker within a week.
What took longer to notice was a particular kind of gap. I wasn’t lonely. There were neighbours, there was a village, there was a life. But there was nobody around me who had done the same two things I had: moved here from somewhere else, and built something they run themselves.
Those are two different kinds of odd, and each one on its own is common enough. Plenty of people here came from abroad. Plenty of people here work for themselves. Both at once, in this province, is a smaller room than you’d expect — and it comes with a set of things that are hard to explain to anyone standing outside it.
What I looked for and didn’t find
There are groups for people from abroad, and they are mostly about arriving, or about retiring. There are business networks, and they are mostly in Spanish and mostly about finding clients. Neither of those is wrong. Neither was what I wanted.
So this is that group, built from the other direction. Three conditions, no industry, no programme, no advice. Lunch, once a month, with people who don’t need the situation explained to them.
What I do, and why it doesn’t matter here
I work in IT security as an autónomo, and I run two small businesses of my own. That is my job. This isn’t.
Nobody at that table is a prospect, and nobody is going to be sold anything — by me or by anyone else. If it ever feels otherwise, tell me, because then I’ll have got something badly wrong.
What I want out of the first year
Ten or fifteen people who come back. Not a long list — a table that fills reliably, where people start recognising each other and remembering what the others do. Everything else in the plan depends on that happening first, and it either will or it won’t.
If the description fits you, come once and see.