Alexander didn’t mean to stay. In the winter of 2022 he arrived in Tenerife with a specific plan: a few months, then back to Ukraine. A doctor had recommended getting his daughter away from Ukraine’s cold winters, which were aggravating her respiratory problems, and the Canary Islands looked like the right place. As chief engineer for a Dutch company, he could work remotely from there just as well as from Kyiv. Then the war broke out, and that one-winter plan turned into a life.
He tells the story himself on Herrera en COPE Tenerife, with the bluntness of someone who has learned to live in a country that isn’t his but that, he says, “is paradise for kids.” His daughter’s health improved, the climate and outdoor life helped, and Alexander now speaks Spanish well enough that it has opened doors that would otherwise have stayed shut. But his account also carries the other side of a phenomenon Canary Islands institutions actively encouraged for years.
During the pandemic, with tourism at zero, the islands promoted themselves aggressively as a refuge for European remote workers. At first it was mostly surfers with laptops, passing through for a couple of months. Then the profile shifted: highly paid professionals earning 4,000 or 5,000 euros, planning to stay at least a year. That’s where the benefit for the archipelago got complicated. The high profitability of short-term rentals to foreigners pushed many landlords to favor nomads over local residents, hollowing out historic neighborhoods like Las Canteras in Gran Canaria or central Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The result, according to COPE, has been a sharp rise in rents and a cost of living among the highest in Spain.
Alexander felt it directly once he stopped being a long-stay tourist and started looking for a place to settle. “It cost me a lot,” he admits plainly. At first he lived in an Airbnb, comfortable but expensive. Then came the search for a real long-term rental, and with it the language barrier, even before he understood how the market worked. Some intermediaries tried to charge him extra commissions, others demanded disproportionate guarantees despite his verifiable income as an engineer for a Dutch company. “If you don’t know Spanish and Canary Islands law well, some people try to take advantage,” he says.
Then there’s the tax chapter, the part that puzzles him most. As a self-employed worker, Alexander pays what he calls “very high” taxes. And he asks a question Canary Islands residents themselves have repeated for generations: why does IGIC, the archipelago’s separate customs and tax system, exist at all instead of the rules that apply in the rest of Spain. “There are two or three things that bother me,” he says, though not enough to make him regret the decision.
In the end his balance still tips positive, with one clear piece of advice for anyone following his path: learn Spanish, because life changes completely for those who speak the local language. And a thought that reaches beyond his own experience, toward a country, Ukraine, where the war continues: for him and his family, he says, Spain’s support still matters enormously.
His story lands as the debate over digital nomads in the Canary Islands grows sharper. It’s no longer just about how many arrive, but about what they leave behind and what they take from the people who have always called the islands home. Between an engineer who found health and work and a resident who can no longer find housing in their own neighborhood, there’s rarely a single answer.
