We are visited in Spain by many friends each year. Some family and friends liked it so much here that they decided to spend longer periods. Some have even bought houses and live here too. My personal life and professional career have been closely linked to the needs of foreign residents in Spain, how to deal with the problems they encounter, how to help them to cope with the differences between Spain and other European countries... This all helped me realise first hand how few resources are infact available to help foreign residents fully enjoy this wonderful country.

I suppose I started to think about the possibility of writing a guide for foreign residents in Spain, when I began to experience for myself some of the infuriating difficulties involved in applying for residence, getting a work permit, health care, a driving licence, finding, renting and then buying property, having a baby, learning how to ask for roast pork in restaurants without being served half a suckling pig with it's head still on, how to get my kids into state schools, how to get them out again and matriculate them in the European school, how to locate reputable Spanish courses for students interested in coming to Spain to study Spanish language and culture..... The list is endless, and yet at least I spoke Spanish! Foreign residents in Spain who don't yet speak the language can experience real problems when trying to fathom Spanish burocracy or when just trying to get on with life over here.

Another thing - although I love Spain, I missed my own country right from the beginning. My family, newspapers, Coronation Street and other British television treasures, marmite, custard, English books, even the rain (honest!). Then Internet arrived. In 1988 when I started living and working in Spain, Internet was just beginning over here, and it wouldn't be until about 8 years later that it caught on to such an extent as to really affect Spanish peoples' personal and professional lives. It was obvious that Internet offered foreign residents here a whole range of hitherto unthought of possibilities, not only information and advice about how to go about things in Spain, but also resources and tools to help us feel more in contact with our friends and families in our home countries. I started to develop this idea further some 7 years ago, while I was on maternity leave and Euroresidentes is the result.

In 1999 I started to publish the first contents armed with an idea, a computer, a simple modem (and very slow) Internet conexion and Netscape Composer (all the rage in those days). Soon a portal started to emerge, albeit with a rather homemade (if not catastrophic) design (see left). Although I was very proud of it at the time!

To begin with I published the site on a free hosting service in the USA, and when that place disappeared just at the start of the dot-com crisis, I moved to another service after losing half the files. It was to my great surprise, and delight, that we started immediatly to receive messages and questions from foreign residents in Spain, aswell as from European nationals thinking about moving to Spain, and wanting to find out more information before actually taking the plunge.

7 years later, Internet has established itself as a basic source of information for more and more people all over the World. The new Euroresidentes Spain site reflects this and other changes, and as you can see the design has become more professional too over the years (thanks to Trini who tactfully transformed my first attempts into a real portal). The contents in Spanish have grown substantially, particularly the scientific and technologies sections. Euroresidentes Nanotecnología is the Spanish-speaking world's first and most consulted portal on Nanotechnology, our section of recipies is one of the largest selections of recetas available in Spanish, our travel section is one of the most extensive in Spanish on the Internet. Euroresidentes continues to grow in strength, visitor statistics, breadth of information and content. We now collaborate with several media groups in Spain and in the UK, we have collaborated on different projects with the European Commission and Spain's Telefónica, we have also signed agreements with banks, travel companies and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology in the US.
Our independence, versatility and freedom is one of Euroresidentes' greatest strengths, as are the hours and hours of hard work and the enthusiasm of the team who contribute content.