The Backstory
It took us years of travelling, working, experimenting and searching to land us in our new life here in the Spanish Pyrenees. Let me take you back to 2012 when it all began.
In our early twenties we were yet to meet, even though we both studied in Leeds at the same time (Tom - Music, and Lucy - Graphic Design), graduating in 2012. I went off to South-east Asia with a friend, for three months of travelling. I did this somewhat begrudgingly - I was keen to move to London and start my graphic design career. Little did I know these three months would turn into four years and completely change the course of my life.
Lucy with the girls in New Zealand, pre-Tom.
During my travels I met an incredible group of women who I later travelled Australia with, followed by New Zealand, which we all fell in love with. We applied for working holiday visas and set up life there for a while.
Meanwhile after graduating, Tom remained in Leeds for a year working and spending time with his girlfriend of three years. After the relationship ended, he took off for Thailand to let loose before heading to New Zealand to enjoy some mountain biking - his favourite hobby. He was looking forward to making the most of being single…
Just as I was considering heading home after two years away, Tom shows up on the scene. Introduced to the group by a mutual friend, he slotted in nicely. Teased for our flirty banter, we denied any chemistry until, after one two many drinks, on one of our many nights out… the rest is history!
Tom moved in with us girls - after the sofa he was sleeping on ceased to be available - and I delayed my return to England. We worked multiple jobs to fund our life of fun: I worked as a physio receptionist by day and led a bar crawl by night. Tom worked as a pizza chef and adventure travel rep. When we weren’t working we were out partying, exploring the Otago region of New Zealand, hiking, biking, skiing, swimming in the lake and generally having the time of our lives.
My visa ran out after six months of being together. I thought that would be it for us as a couple, but Tom said that, whilst he wasn’t ready to return to England, perhaps they could travel somewhere else together? Maybe Australia?
So off we went to Melbourne, via a few weeks in South-East Asia for good measure. We quickly found a great group of friends, and jobs that paid slightly more than minimum wage. We felt like we were starting to do ‘real adulting’.
That is until our two year Working Holiday Visa was running out, and it was time to decide whether to commit to life in Australia, or move back to the UK.
It was my refusal to live long-term on the other side of the world from my family that took us back to the UK. We sometimes look at this point as a potential point of regret - should we have stayed? And saved ourselves the years of yearning for something more, something better? That we’ll never know, but we do know that there is no point in having regrets.
Tom hesitantly agreed, but on two conditions. He didn’t want to live down South (where I grew up). We’d need to move back to his neck of the woods - Sheffield. And we had to do a big, ‘lust hurrah’ adventure on the way back; if the plan was to try and get on with ‘adulting’ on our arrival back in the UK.
Hence our motorbike adventure came to fruition - six months travelling 17 countries in central and south America on a knackered old British motorbike, named Black Betty. Our old blog is still live ten years later, if you want to take a look!
If you can sit on a motorbike with someone for more than 20,000km through dozens of stressful situations, it’s a pretty good sign that you can manage most of what life can throw at you. It was this trip that made us realise that there wasn’t much we wouldn’t be able to handle together.
All the while our eyes were opened to other people, other cultures, other ways of life. How varied and rich life can be. And we started to pick up some Spanish, a hobby we continued for the years that followed (luckily!).
We landed back in the UK - after years of living abroad - in December 2016. Tom admitted to me years later that, sat in the back of my parents’ car driving down the motorway, upon seeing a UK road-sign he felt a deep sense of wrong. But we threw ourselves into this new life just as we had with the others, with enthusiasm and excitement to try something new.
After giving up a pretty awesome life in Melbourne we were keen to make this one a success, and quick. While staying with Tom’s parents we got jobs asap and started looking at houses to buy. Four months later we had a mortgage and an offer accepted on a house. We moved in, filled the house with savvy second-hand furniture and started putting our own stamp on it. Summer came round and after a lot of unsubtle hints from me, Tom proposed on a camping weekend in the Lake District. A week later I’d booked the venue.
Looking back, since moving to the UK we were always so keen for the next step. Very rarely did we pause and take in the present. I don’t know if it’s because we were chasing a feeling; trying to reach a stage of contentedness. However, we’ve noticed it’s something we still do now, and we have to remind ourselves to step back, breathe, and take in everything we have achieved and continue to achieve, lest we miss it.
That winter, after breaking his arm and not being able to work, Tom suffered with mild depression. It was a huge shock for me: Tom had always been so unphased by the ups and downs of life. But now he was so low, unenthused, and didn’t hide his resentment that we were back in the UK. He rarely directly blamed me, but the thought was there and it was obvious.
After months of negotiating and trying to find a solution, all whilst planning their wedding, I eventually agreed they could explore the idea of going back to Australia. But whilst looking into visas and shifting the idea from thought to reality, I began to struggle sleeping and lost all appetite.
I realised I had to listen to my gut instinct and tell Tom that I didn’t want to return to the other side of the world now that I had reconnected with family and friends in the UK.
This was hard - Tom had started to seem much more himself since pursuing this idea. But after four years together the truth didn’t come as a shock to Tom, he’d seen the change in me and had seen the news coming.
So Australia was off the cards, but we agreed to keep our minds open to a potential alternative, and to focus for now on the wedding and planning our next adventure. We got married in the August, bought and converted a campervan which we named Betty Blue, and the following Spring rented out our house and left for Europe.
It felt good to be exploring again and doing things on our own terms. Seeing new things and having new experiences. We spent six months travelling around the majority of Europe, moving a lot, largely staying in the mountains, trying to tick off as many countries as we could, until we broke down in Montenegro and were stuck for a few weeks.
During these travels, we’d met a few people travelling with babies and our minds started to wonder… were we ready for this next step? Maybe having children would give us the grounding we needed to feel more at home in the UK.
We assumed it would take a few months for anything to happen, but by the time we returned to the UK a month later, I was pregnant. It took us a little by surprise - from hearing the experiences of others we’d assumed it wouldn’t happen straight away. The reality started so sink in, and so once the van was fixed we headed straight back out to Europe for a final few months before returning to the UK to have our baby.
It was during this time that we revisited the Spanish Pyrenees, somewhere we’d been on a motorbike holiday before we got married. The thought crossed our minds then: what a wonderful place this could be to live one day.
In May 2020, our third Betty came to life. In the midst of the first Covid lock down, what felt like our biggest adventure yet: a newborn baby. Whilst so many suffered that year, we are so lucky to think back so fondly on that time - with nothing to do and nowhere to go, we sat together in the sun and soaked up our new baby. A whole new person we’d created. We felt very content for the first time in a long time.
But as the world opened up, so returned the niggles of discontent and the longing for something different.
By now Tom was renovating houses for work, and I was working remotely for a digital media company. After a couple of years of ticking on in ‘normal life’, we were struggling once again.
The Spanish Pyrenees popped back into our minds - could it be the answer? It ticked a lot of boxes - not far from family, a sense of adventure, glorious weather, a great community. We got excited. We started planning another trip - to scope out Spain as a potential place to live, and also to prove wrong everyone who had told us that our travelling days were over now that we had a child.
We converted a bigger campervan, the shell of which was a Transport For London disability bus, and set off to Europe again. This time with a 2-year-old Betty.
We returned to the Pyrenees, excited at what we’d find and how we’d feel looking at it through this new lens. We weren’t disappointed - this could be it! We booked some house viewings to see the kind of thing on the market, the kind of property we could dream about. We saw Finca Baraona on the first day.
But it would take us another four and a half years to own it.
We were so excited - this was the answer! We agreed a price with the vendors, we’d sell our home in Sheffield… we could be here within the year.
But in a newly post-Brexit world, moving to Europe wasn’t so simple. In our case, it would in fact turn out to be impossible. We spoke to immigration advisors, desperate to find a way. But in our current situation, there wasn’t one. They were no applicable visa options.
We were crushed.
We sat with this a few weeks and went back to the drawing board. We were still in the van and right next Portugal - we’d seen on the forums that Portugal was a much easier place to move to in terms of visa and financial requirements. Why not explore the option while we were here.
With renewed excitement, off we went. We scaled the whole country from top to bottom, ending in the spot we thought would suit us best based on our research.
Exploring the mountains of Portugal
We had hoped - and naively assumed - that there would be enough similarities that it would be a viable option. But whilst it was a beautiful place, after weeks of exploring we admitted to each other that we just weren’t feeling it. There was no one reason, other than it just didn’t feel ‘right’. We returned to the UK once more, down-trodden and exhausted from travelling with a toddler.
At the very least we had proved to ourselves that yes, you for sure can travel with children.
But boy is it hard work!
Once again we decided to park the idea. It just wasn’t possible right now, there wasn’t a viable option that didn’t take us too far away from our UK family. So instead we filled our time with expanding our own family - baby Mila arrived in July 2023, and the two girls kept us busy enough to not revisit the idea of our relocation again for a little while.
However, every night on the sofa we would watch programmes where people relocated and started new lives, in particular “Help! We Bought A Village!”. Every time we watched an episode it kept the seed of our dream alive, kept it watered with hope and inspiration so that we never fully let it go.
We sold the bus after deciding it was two big for the smaller adventures we’d now be doing as a family of four. We bought and converted a third campervan, and when Mila was a few months old we set off on our first trips as a family of four - first to Devon and later taking the ferry back to the Spanish Pyrenees.
Tom had been working really hard the last couple of years, and the housing market was booming. From our research there was a chance that we could now potentially meet the requirements of the visa we needed to move. We wanted to revisit the area to see how we felt now that we were a four, to see if we still felt the same.
It’s no surprise that we felt no different on returning to the Aragonese Pyrenees. If anything, going back for the fourth time created such a sense of familiarity that we felt like we belonged there. We checked the listings - ‘our house’ was still on the market. We went to see it again, this time with both girls. We had the same feeling we had the first time - the feeling of endless possibility.
Of a whole new life opening up in front of us.
We got home to the UK, and threw ourselves back in to seeing if we could make it work. With what we had saved plus the potential sale of our house, we could meet the financial requirements. We talked to immigration advisors again - they couldn’t guarantee, but there was a strong chance we’d now get accepted based on what we had. There was no clear path to permanent residency, but we were told if we could just get in to Spain, it would be much easier to find a path to stay there long-term.
We spent the next few weeks weighing up pros and cons. But there was only so much research and preparation we could do to know if it would all work out ok. At one point we’d just have to make the leap and hope for the best.
While we were struggling to take that final step, a letter arrived. It was a reminder to apply for Betty’s school place.
This was a pivotal moment for us. I had a feeling that if we put her in school in the UK and she started to make friends and have a solid routine, that it would become too hard to leave. It was the push we needed. We simultaneously put our house on the market and paid for the visa application.
We had worked really hard over the last few years to renovate our house ourselves, and when we put it on the market we were able to sell it for a lot more than what we bought it for. This meant that we had the opportunity to transfer the remainder of our mortgage to a smaller property in Sheffield, something that we could keep as a backup in case it didn’t work out in Spain. Something that we could rent out for a little bit of income to keep us going. This safety net gave us the courage we needed to push on.
The only visa we could apply for was the Non-Lucrative Visa. This meant that we weren’t allowed to work whilst in Spain, so this income could also be vital in assuring we could maintain our new life there.
It was almost impossible to get everything to line up neatly. We were hoping that we could move out of our home and move straight to Spain, but by the time our completion date rolled around we still didn’t have our visas confirmed.
What would happen if our house was sold and then our visas were denied… it didn’t bear thinking about. The visas were supposed to take maximum three months to be approved or denied, but after four months we were still waiting. The school term had started. I was at home with two kids and no childcare, full-time.
Eventually the house sale went through. We had to move into the house that we bought as an investment, something we weren’t prepared for. It felt that we were in total limbo, held in a waiting pattern between our old life and potential new one, with no control over the outcome, without even knowing if this ‘new life’ would come to fruition.
Leaving our Sheffield home of seven years
Finally in October - having thought that we’d be moving out to Spain in September - we decided we had to do something proactive. We were struggling. Every day was an unknown, with no plan or routine.
And so we enrolled Betty in the local school to give her some structure. We found a childminder for Mila to go to a couple of mornings a week to give me some headspace. We decided that no matter when/ if the visas came through, we could put off moving until after Christmas now. It would be too tricky to make it work before then.
Betty’s first day of school in the UK
The week Betty started in her new school was the week our visa confirmation came through. So typical, but now we had had a plan.
We had the visas, we could move and we would move, just not right this minute. Now that we had the visas, it meant that we could go ahead with the purchase of the Spanish house - they’ve been waiting for us. And so had the finca - for four and a half long years.
Now remember the TV show I mentioned earlier, that we watched to keep the dream alive?
I had said to Tom years before, that if we ever did end up doing anything like that, that I would have to apply for the programme as a kind of full circle moment. He likely rolled his eyes and thought nothing of it at the time. But once we had our visas and I knew we were going to buy the house, I sent off an email. Within 24 hours we’d signed contracts allowing “Help! We Bought A Village!” to follow our journey.
The next thing we did after getting our visas is organise a trip back out to Spain. This time just Tom and I, purely for the purpose of signing for our new home. Now that was an exciting trip! Tom drove out in his work van with all his tools - we’d leave them in the house after signing for it. I flew out and met him there. It was a wild 48 hours - we sat in the notary office with the notary, estate agent, and four co-owners of the house. The level of Spanish was way beyond us - we largely smiled and nodded until we signed the paper put in front of us and handed over the cheques. In exchange they handed us an enormous metal key - the finca was ours!!
A completely surreal moment
We went straight to the house and took in this incredible moment. It was incomprehensible.
To make it all the more surreal, we had a cameraman with us at this point. He got some wonderful photos and footage of this day - which will be shown on Channel 4 in September 2026!
We unpacked Tom’s tools, and looked around once more. It was ours!!
We couldn’t dawdle for long though - the kids were back in the UK and we had a hell of a lot to organise before we returned for good a couple of months later.
The next part is a blur of trying to pack up a house for a second time. Tying up every loose end before emigrating. Organising shipping for our stuff. Goodbyes. Admin. Stress.
But in February 2025, we left for good. This stage was almost easier than the first move from our family home - a lot of the heartache had already happened and in the mean time the new house had served as a kind of waiting room for our new life. We were so ready to make the leap now.
The car was rammed. We head for the ferry. This was it.
We took the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander
Two days later, equally excited and exhausted, we drove off the ferry into the country that would become our new home.
So now you know our back story. We’ll pick up from here in a future post I am yet to write - “Settling In To Our New Life In Spain”.
Thanks for reading and welcome to the journey.
Lucy x
