All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Ranked consistently as one of the best places to reside after retirement, projected to be the most visited destination in the world by 2040, and voted year after year in the Readers’ Choice Awards as one of our readers’ favorite countries, living in Spain is an aspiration for many. Now, following the announcement of a new digital nomad program, eligible remote workers could be paid to move to Spain's picturesque countryside.
On August 25, 2024, the Regional Government of Extremadura—an autonomous community in Spain—released information regarding their new digital nomad initiative. The program, called “Live in Ambroz”, offers remote workers up to €15,000 (around $16,620) in grants to relocate to Ambroz Valley, a rural area of Extremadura, for at least two years.
Just under a three-hour drive from Madrid and about two hours away from Portugal, Ambroz Valley is home to bucolic forests, charming villages, and scenic mountains. It has eight towns in total: Abadía, Aldeanueva del Camino, Baños de Montemayor, Casas del Monte, La Garganta, Gargantilla, Hervás, and Segura de Toro.
The region was awarded an EDEN (European Destination of Excellence) Award in 2019 from the European Commission for its “sustainable tourism practices [as a] smaller tourist destination," specifically honoring the valley’s millenia-long heritage as a wellness center. Its top attractions include the famous Baños de Montemayor Roman Spa, where modern thermal pools sit alongside those used over 2,000 years ago by the Romans, the Silver Greenway, which was hiked by the Celts at the tail-end of the Bronze Age, and the annual Magical Autumn Festival (Otoño Mágico) celebrating the valley’s biodiversity and landscape.
Why is the program being launched?
Though Ambroz Valley is a celebrated destination of Spanish heritage, the permanent residential population of the region remains quite small. Hervás, the capital of the region best known for its historic Jewish quarter, is the most populated village in the valley with 3,907 residents as of the last census. Fellow municipalities, such as Segura de Toro, have populations as low as 181 residents. The new digital nomad program was designed to help combat this population decline, as Ambroz Valley is “one of the areas that is suffering from a constant loss of population and services,” per the press release from Extremadura.
The valley is one of the country's many rural regions facing a concern known as “Empty Spain.” The term coined by author Sergio de Molino in his 2016 nonfiction book, La España Vacía, describes the contrast between the country’s underpopulated interior and crowded urban centers, which have recently been strained by the stress of overtourism. The dearth of economic opportunity in so-called Empty Spain regions has especially impacted the women in affected communities, a phenomenon documented by journalist Ana Valiente in her case study of the Spanish province Zamora. And on March 31, 2019, the Empty Spain movement gained international attention when some 100,000 citizens from affected areas took to the streets of Madrid to organize.
Since then, several attempts to mitigate the crisis have been mobilized, including Spain's introduction of a digital nomad visa at the start of 2023, when Spain joined 12 other EU countries offering visas for remote workers. Incentivizing highly qualified workers to relocate to the country’s rural areas could help Spain combat both rural population decline and overtourism in urban hubs like Barcelona.
Dr. Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School whose research concentrates on the changing geography of work, tells Condé Nast Traveler: “Digital nomads can create value for their host communities through consumption, community volunteering, entrepreneurship, connections, and mentoring, however, this requires an active process of making connections between digital nomads and locals.”
As opposed to parachuting wealthy residents in, Live in Ambroz intends to court digital nomads who can foster these deeper commitments to their new communities. “If successful, they could literally change the country, its economy, and its love-hate relationship with tourism,” Patricia Palacios, co-founder of the travel blog España Guide, tells Traveler. “Hopefully the Ambroz Valley will be successful and set an example for many other rural areas to copy.”
How does the program work?
Under the program, up to 200 eligible digital nomads will receive grants meant for “available housing, arable land, and everything necessary to expedite their arrival.”
Spanish authorities told Euronews that the distribution of funds depends on the demographic information of the recipient: Women under 30 years old relocating to towns with populations under 5,000 residents will receive €10,000 upfront, or $11,085, while everyone else will receive €8,000, or $8,868. After the minimum term of two years, the former will receive an additional installment of €5,000, or $5,541, if they elect to stay for another year, while the latter will receive €4,000, or $4,433.
If accepted into the program, recipients will have three months to register with an Ambroz Valley municipality for a padrón certificate, a necessary local record of residence. After obtaining a padrón, they will have one month to request payment from the first grants, which will be transferred in a single transaction.
Who is eligible?
Eligible applicants must fit the following three criteria, per Euronews:
- You can not have already resided in Extremadura for any time in the past six months.
- You must have be a legal resident in Spain and have a foreign identity number, though you may be a foreign national. Non-EU nationals must first obtain Spain’s digital nomad visa and official residency before they can apply to the Live in Ambroz program.
- You must work remotely in the tech sector, specifically, “through the exclusive use of media and IT systems, telematics, and information fields.”
How to apply
Spanish authorities say the official opening date for applications will be around mid-September, according to the Euronews report. The applications will be submitted through the Extremadura General Electronic Access Point (prospective applicants must submit their digital certificate of residency or electronic Spanish ID card to the platform). Additionally, an official document from your home country or current region of Spain is required to certify your residency, as well as approval from your employer to work remotely in Extremadura. Self-employed applicants will need to submit detailed documentation of the terms and conditions of their professional remote work. Documents that are not in Spanish must also have a sworn legal translation certified by a professional. Successful applicants will be notified within 3 months.
