Planning to move to Las Palmas?
You are probably looking around on the internet to find out if Gran Ganaria of Las Palmas is a great place to move to. I’m of course a little biased because I’ve choosen to live there, but here are my reasons why I think it is great.
Community
There is an active community on Facebook where you can ask a lot of questions and there you can find a lot of answers to already asked questions.
I just copy pasted the pinned post of the Gran Canaria Digital Nomads-group:
- South vs. North
- Learn Spanish
- Coffee shops to work
- Accommodation
- Car rental
- Coworking+Coliving
- Swimming pools
- NIE (Residencia)
- Taxes
- Accounting
- Meetups
- SIM card with mobile data
- Global startupl
- Send packages
- Hiking
Spanish language
I did some Spanish lessons with Laura León from La Casita de Laura, she is great! The one-to-one lessons are great for getting advice specific for your needs. Here is an interview with her. Laura also offers some places to stay, so if you want to come here, let her know.
There is also a Facebook-group called Multicultural language exchange - Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. They have about 2 meetings a week and everyone can participate. The learning Spanish is more an excuse for drinking some beers, but you should try it.
There is also the Michel Thomas Spanish lessons. You can download them via their shop (but it is quite expensive) or just steal it from a torrent website. The learning happens via listening sessions of a total of 8 hours. After that you can communicate pretty well in Spanish (I’m told).
Moving
Here are some tips when you decided to move to Gran Canaria.
Living
There are a lot of websites, but I got these from the locals.
- La Casita de Laura
- idealista.com (found my place with this one)
- enalquiler.com (I like this one)
- pisos.com (did not get a lot of responses here)
- vibbo.com/pisos/ (was segundamano.es)
It is also pretty easy to just come here and ask around. The first 2 weeks I was offered 3 places to stay, so it is not that hard.
Stay connected
I use Orange SIM Mundo 2GB and I’m pretty happy about it. It is a pay-as-you-go contract, so you just put money on it and you can use 2GB per month for € 15,-. Calls to other Mondo clients are free (if you charged in the last 30 days) and calling to mobile phones in The Netherlands is around € 0,13 per minute. Most people here are saying this is a great deal.
There is also a deal from vodafone where you can have some international phonecalls. 60 minutes for 15 euro’s. I don’t think it is better then the Orange one.
Social security number
If you want to live in Spain and have the privileges of the locals you will need a NIE. Download the form here, you can also download the English version and use that to fill in the official Spanish form.
You can read more here (in Dutch):
