The Facebook group “Tenerife Remote Workers and Digital Nomads” has more than 38,000 members. The one covering the whole archipelago, “Canary Islands Digital Nomads & Remote Workers”, tops 17,000. These numbers alone say something official tourism data rarely captures: behind the label “digital nomad” sits an ecosystem built largely on informal networks, assembled from the ground up, often before institutions even noticed the phenomenon.
Repeople, for instance, was founded in Gran Canaria in 2017 with the stated goal of building remote worker communities at a local, international and virtual level, according to the official Canary Islands tourism portal. The project is also among the organisers of Nomad City, described by the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria city council itself as one of the leading events dedicated to digital nomads in Europe: an annual gathering that brings together distributed-work professionals, companies and institutions to discuss how to make cities more welcoming to people who work anywhere except a fixed office.
It is not the only initiative of its kind in the archipelago. In Lanzarote, Coworking Guru leans into a mix of art, technology and creative networking. Pueblos Remotos, by contrast, works in the opposite direction from big urban centres, promoting remote work as a lever for revitalising rural areas by bringing digital nomads together with local communities inland, with the stated aim of generating a positive economic and cultural impact for both sides. In Las Palmas, “Live it Up” uses Slack to organise events and community activities, while platforms like Meetup offer a regular calendar of coworking and social meetups on both Gran Canaria and Tenerife.
There is also an international layer: since 2018, the Canary Islands have been one of the recurring destinations for WiFi Tribe, a global community that organises multi-week group stays in different cities around the world, and the islands consistently rank among the top twenty destinations on Nomadlist, the sector’s reference platform for comparing cost of living, connectivity, climate and safety before choosing where to settle temporarily.
Putting these pieces together paints a different picture from the somewhat glossy image of the digital nomad with a laptop on the beach. The real community organises itself in Facebook groups mostly discussing rentals, legal questions and practical recommendations, structures itself around island-specific coworking spaces, and runs on recurring events designed precisely to break the isolation of working alone, far from colleagues and family.
The underlying question, one that affects residents and newcomers alike, remains open: how much these networks actually integrate arrivals with the local population, beyond making life easier among peers. Initiatives like Pueblos Remotos, which deliberately choose inland villages over the busier coastal towns, at least seem to be attempting a different answer than the big urban networks. But it is a balance built day by day, Facebook group by Facebook group, not through a single institutional announcement.
