Well, Spain’s had a big year.
And so have I, over here at the world headquarters of The Chorizo Chronicles blog and Spain to Go podcast.
So let’s do a bit of a recap, shall we?
A review of 2025, full of warm, chorizo-ey goodness. Ready?
The Decline of Europe
Morena and I started the year in Dubai, oddly enough.
I never got around to writing about that whole experience – we were in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – but suffice it to say I won’t be moving there any time soon.
After that, back in Barcelona, my first article about Spanish life was actually called The Decline of Europe. In that one, I looked at the fall in the euro currency and the general feeling that Europe’s best days are behind it.
Unfortunately, soon after I wrote that, the euro went back up a bit – so people who have just moved to Spain or are hoping to move soon spent a large part of the year panicking about the fall of the dollar.
A lot of people, of course, want to blame Donald Trump.
But I’ve been around for a long time, and the fact is the dollar to euro exchange rates move around a lot. This current range (one euro is worth between $1.10 and $1.20) is nothing new, and in fact, during the Obama years it was much much worse.
Anyway, at the beginning of this year it really did look, to me, like dollar-euro parity was where we were headed… and I was wrong. Sorry about that.
I’ll try to avoid writing about small currency fluctuations in the future.
What is true is that there’s a lot of talk about how Europe’s going to have to prepare for a new geopolitical reality. Whether they’ll be able to stay competitive as a world power is anyone’s guess.
Does Spain have the world’s best economy?
Soon after, I wrote about an article in The Economist that named Spain as the world’s best economy.
I expressed some doubt about it, actually. My main point being that macro-economic data doesn’t necessarily reflect an improvement in the lives of working-class people and small business owners (like myself).
Because in the last several years, rent prices have doubled, and taxes for self-employment have increased remarkably. Food costs a lot more than it used to. And despite increases in the minimum wage, I don’t get the idea that a lot of people are actually doing better than they were in (say) 2018.
We’ve also had a lot of immigration in the past years, so a slightly bigger economic pie is divided up among more people than ever – which doesn’t exactly benefit those who are struggling to get by.
I wrote about that in the article Population Explosion.
Towards the end of 2025, I saw that the IBEX 35 – the Spanish stock market – had finally recovered its levels from before the economic crisis of 2008. Meaning it took 17 years, but here we are. Hooray!
Now I’m reading that the IBEX is set to become the European index with the most gains this year.
In any case, nobody I know is invested in the Spanish stock market. It’s not a popular thing here, and I doubt regular people’s pension funds are doing great as a result of these gains, because regular people are just paying into the government pension system – there’s no 401k plan.
A booming stock market is just another thing that sounds good as a headline in the “Economy” section of the newspaper, but doesn’t improve the lives of most people.
Housing Crisis and Spanish Nationality
In March, my application for Spanish nationality was rejected.
My lawyer filed an appeal, and several months later got it approved. So now I’m both American and Spanish. (I’m still trying to figure out what that means. If you have any idea, please let me know.)
As usual, talk to Roberto at Melcart Abogados for all your legal needs. (Tell him Daniel from The Chorizo Chronicles sent you. He may give me a commission or something for recommending him.)
And if you’re looking for a US background check (the one from the FBI you need when you apply for a Spanish visa or residence permit) or an apostilled and translated birth certificate, talk to Joanne at continentalis.eu – again, tell her Daniel sent you.
In April, I wrote about the big housing crisis and the blame game everyone’s playing.
Personally, I blame the larger population (read: immigration of all kinds) plus a lot of unnecessary regulation which makes it very difficult to build new flats.
Nothing the current government is doing seems to be making the situation any better, so whoever’s to blame, it looks like this housing crisis will be around for a while.
On the topic of moving to Spain I answered a couple of burning questions you may also have: Do the Spanish hate expats and/or Americans? and also Is living in Spain overrated?
More philosophically, I wrote about identity performance for the algorithm. That’s about how people like to loudly broadcast their beliefs online, when it’s more than probable that their beliefs were just assigned to them by their social group, and haven’t been examined in any serious way.
2025: Fifty years without Franco
In my recap of last year, I mentioned that 2025 was the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death, and promised to read Paul Preston’s huge biography and write about it.
I figured this would take me a month or two, but in the event, it took all year, and I only got through half the book. Writing about Spain’s great national trauma is difficult, and I try to be as even-handed as possible.
Also, I do a lot of other things, and have to (occasionally) make a living.
Anyway, the result of all that is the article Franco and the Spanish Civil War – the making of Spain’s Caudillo, which I think is pretty good.
At some point in 2026, I’ll follow it up with an article about what happened after the Civil War – Franco was around, after all, until the 70s, and a lot of Spanish history happened in those decades.
Over the summer of 2025 we had some events which finally made me think seriously about the “rise of the far right”. The first article I wrote about that phrase was way back in 2018, when Vox and other right-wing parties were getting less than 1% of the vote.
A lot has happened since then, and people are pretty exhausted with the leftist PSOE and their center-right opposition party, the PP. In Spain’s most recent election – a regional one in Extremadura, a few days ago – Vox got almost 17% of the vote. So they’re definitely on the rise, currently the third-most-popular party in Spain.
The Rise of Spain’s Far Right
My article about the far-right protests against immigrants down in Murcia will get you up to speed on what happened over the summer. I’ll do an update if anything else happens on that front.
In related news, around the anniversary of Franco’s death a survey came out in which something like 18% of Spanish teenagers said they have a favorable impression of the dictatorship.
I’d like to point out that eighteen percent isn’t all that much.
Before worrying about that number, I’d like to know what percentage of Spanish teenagers believe in fairies, and how many think that “communism is a good idea that’s just never been tried”.
It seems likely that 18% of teenagers might say yes to any stupid survey question you ask, and maybe their political opinions will change somewhat as soon as they move out of their parents’ house – which, of course, they’ll probably do in their late 30s. Because of the housing crisis.
On the other hand, if you’ve been around for a while, you also remember the Great Recession and the rise of the Spanish far left. That lasted a couple of election cycles, but it’s apparently over now.
The left has risen, and fallen, and just keeps falling.
Fall of the Far Left
In fact, other than Yolanda Díaz hanging on as Second Vice President under Pedro Sánchez, I don’t know where any of those Podemos people ended up.
Just kidding, of course: Pablo Iglesias (the pony-tailed class warrior with the million-dollar house outside Madrid) got a haircut and has opened a bar in Lavapiés, down in Madrid.
So that’s where he ended up: gentrifying an immigrant neighborhood with open-mic poetry and a menu that somehow makes salmorejo into a statement against fascism.
(In case you’re new to Spanish cuisine, salmorejo is like gazpacho, but thicker.)
Also, Iñigo Errejón, one of the other co-founders of Podemos, was about to go on trial for sexual assault, but the state prosecutor decided to throw the charges out due to a lack of evidence.
I talked about that case in my article on Sex Scandals in the Spanish government – it was, indeed, a he-said-she-said situation taking place in a locked room, so I guess there’s not enough to go to court over.
Meanwhile, several politicians from the PSOE have resigned in recent weeks over allegations of sexual harassment. And there’s always another corruption scandal to read about in the papers. I’m sure that won’t change in 2026.
But let’s move on…
The Spain to Go podcast
You know I have a podcast, right?
Indeed I do. Since 2020, Spain to Go has been the best podcast out there about life in Spain – and I’ve currently got 126 episodes. (This article will eventually be episode #127, and I’ll record the Franco article as – probably – #128.)
Anyway, in 2025 I made 32 new episodes of the Spain to Go podcast, which is not bad. You can listen to it on Spotify and also on Apple Podcasts. Or search for it elsewhere, it’s on all the apps.
A lot of the articles on this blog are also episodes of the podcast, and people say I have a good voice.
In 2025, my most popular episode was #114 – Immigrant Life: the truth about living abroad.
You can listen to that on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. I’m actually thrilled that my immigrant story is the top episode. I poured a lot of emotion into that, and it’s (in my opinion) one of the best things I’ve written.
(It’s an article over here, if you’d like to read it.)
On to more personal topics…
Hacienda madness! Another tax inspection…
I don’t think I mentioned this at any point, but this year I was also inspected by the people at Hacienda again.
My previous tax inspection article might be helpful if you’re in a process like that – basically, you get your accountant to send them a letter, maybe they fine you, and life goes on.
The previous instance (when I was inspected for the 2021 tax year) ended in a small fine because I had tried to deduct my internet bill as a business expense. This time, in 2025, they admitted I’d done nothing wrong.
In any case, I recently saw something suggesting that the people at Hacienda get a bonus whether or not their inspections are successful – in other words, just for harassing people who have done nothing wrong, they get paid. No evidence necessary.
(An article in The Objective – a Spanish website with an English name, for some reason – seems to confirm this.)
Also this year, the Hacienda people decided that they were retroactively raising taxes for 2023, so I had to pay several hundred extra euros in Social Security for a year in which I’d already paid plenty.
As far as I can tell, none of the Spanish political parties are really defending small businesses or the self-employed. Which is odd, because there are millions of us. Oh well.
My life as a world traveller
In my offline life I spent the last couple of weeks of 2024 in Asia.
These articles don’t usually make it to the podcast, because they’re not Spain-related, but I have a report on Morena’s town in Kerala, South India and also on our trip (with Morena’s mom) to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
During 2025 I was in New York to see some museums, Portland (Oregon) to see my dad and Trump’s “war zone” and back in Phoenix, Arizona to see my mom.
A few weeks later, Morena’s company sent us – briefly – to a resort in Florida, which was a lot of fun.
And just before Christmas, we took a brief national trip to Valencia, with a stop in Xàtiva to see some history.
(I had heard that the Borgia family of popes was from there, but there was only a small exhibit about them in town – really a 10-minute video explaining things. Anyway, the castle in Xàtiva was nice.)
And Valencia is great as a Spanish tourism destination. I hear a lot of expats are moving there as well.
Learn Spanish with Daniel
I do a lot of stuff for free. If you enjoy what I do, or find it useful, you can always send me a donation at expatmadrid.com/donate to help out.
On the topic of free stuff, don’t forget I have a channel on YouTube where I teach Spanish.
It’s called “Learn Spanish with Daniel” and I’ve heard that my explanations are clear, easy to follow, and accompanied by interesting cultural information. Check out my top video of 2025 right here.
It’s about the expression “me suena” and how we say that we recognize someone or something. Anyway, I’ve been teaching Spanish over there for a while, and I enjoy the language a lot. Also, now that I’m an official citizen, I guess my accent is actually a “native Spanish accent”. Or something.
Final thoughts on the year 2025
I started this article talking about geopolitics, but really, I don’t enjoy that sort of topic.
Every day of 2025 I’ve seen several new articles in El País and La Vanguardia about how the US is terrible, corrupt and authoritarian, and if only they could learn from the peaceful Europeans, etc etc.
It all sounds to me like some guys with very few actual arguments trying to sound deep, while still being vague enough to not be called out on their BS.
But now that I’m both Spanish and American, I’m hesitant to condemn either country too harshly.
So let’s talk about something completely different.
Every year’s end I do a review of what went well and what went badly during the year – this year, the “things that went well” list is about 20 times longer than the “things that went badly”.
Among the best things this year were going to the gym 5 days a week, and the keto diet. I’ve been struggling with my weight for a while now, and when I stopped drinking (almost 3 years ago) I lost a grand total of zero kilos. I guess all those alcohol calories weren’t the only thing expanding my waistline.
Cutting out carbs for keto actually got me to lose about 20 pounds (AKA 9+ kilos) in four months. I might have more to say about that in the new year.
As I mentioned in my recent article on middle aged wisdom, I’m cautiously optimistic here.
Here’s to a healthy, happy 2026.
Thanks for reading!
Yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. Shoutout to my sponsors and supporters, Isaac at Stellium Estates (for luxury real estate in Madrid and elsewhere), Raúl at Bike Tour in Spain (for self-guided bike tours through amazing Spanish landscapes), and everyone at Walks Tours and Devour Tours for food and experiences around Spain and Europe.
0 comments