I cannot provide a general answer to this question, it really depends on what you value in life the most. I even consider it also depends on your life moment and circumstances. The best city for me a couple of years ago it’s not the best city for me today. That is probably why I have lived in three different Spanish regions (Madrid, Zaragoza and Cádiz). I’m still looking for my ideal place to be, and I am fortunate enough to have personal and professional circumstances that allow me to explore and spend time in new towns and cities to guess if they suit for me or not.
The city with the best quality of life depends a lot on your needs and interests. I don’t necessarily believe in those indexes and rankings measuring which city is better and which is worst. There are, sure, some minimum criteria, but determining which city is better than which other city is almost impossible in a country where life standards are basically the same in the whole territory. In my experience, if you have a decent job (not necessarily extraordinary) with a decent salary, life in Spain is pretty similar regardless on where you live. But that is the case for Spain and for every single country in the world. In the end, virtually every Spanish city can cover anyone’s basic needs and the quality of life is pretty high whether you live in Cádiz or in Bilbao. Some cities are more expensive than others, some cities are more rainy, others are sunnier; some cities are bigger, some other are smaller; some are by the beach and some close to the mountains… but every Spanish city has very high life standards and you can have a life full of quality everywhere. So in order to determine which city has the best quality of life, you’ll need to study your own circumstances, interests and analyze what are you willing to give up and what you value the most. It is more about what you expect from a city than about life standards.
That exercise should be done all by yourself. In my case, after having lived in three different regions and visited most of the country, I got my own conclusions and, for me, the cities with the best quality of life should meet some criteria:
- Size:
I hate life in big cities. I can’t cope with the stress, the traffic and the enormous distances you need to cover to get around. Yes, big cities offer way more leisure activities, you can generally meet people from many different backgrounds and there you can usually find more job opportunities. But none of those things compensate the bad stuff for me. So Madrid and Barcelona are out of my radar and, if possible, I would avoid moving there.
However, a very small city can be distressing too, because at some point there is nothing new to do or see and you can feel trapped. When you wake up one day needing something different, you just can’t find it anywhere. You can end up developing the “island syndrome”. Cities like Teruel, Soria, Palencia, Ávila, Cuenca or any other city with less than 150k inhabitants might seem very small for me.
So, for me, medium-sized cities are the perfect cities. Big enough to provide a wide array of services and opportunities, but small enough to be easily accessible and manageable. I like cities where you can walk to the center in no time, but which are also dynamic and varied. In terms of size, Zaragoza is for me the perfect city. Roughly 700K inhabitants and without a major metropolitan area. Vigo, Burgos, Alicante, Granada, Gijón are also good options. Maybe Valencia and Málaga are too big for me (Málaga is smaller than Zaragoza, but its metropolitan area is way bigger).
- Connectivity and natural surroundings:
Since I'm a bit of an itchy feet, quite often I need to leave my town and explore new cities and areas. This is why, for my quality of life, I need to have an easy access to other cities and to nature. In general, Spanish cities are very well connected, but the best connected cities in Spain are those in the North-East, close to the Ebro Valley. Zaragoza, Logroño, Pamplona or even Burgos. All these cities are between 1h to 3h driving from other cities, especially larger cities like Madrid and Bilbao, or even Barcelona and Valencia in the case of Zaragoza (Zaragoza is equidistant between Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia), and you are not far from other cities like Valladolid, Soria, Vitoria, San Sebastián… You have a lot of cities and towns nearby and accessible in a relative short time. Now that I live in Cádiz, which is the corner of the Peninsula and with not very good connections, I sometimes find hard to not have these options.
Plus, all the cities above are less than 2 hours from the sea (actually, they are between the Mediterranean and the Cantabric, so they are indeed between two different coastlines) and they are also pretty close to many mountains (Basque Mountains, Iberian Mountains, the Pyrenees…), so the options are limitless. Probably, Logroño, Burgos and Zaragoza are the best cities in this regard. Even if Logroño and Burgos are not very big, its size is highly compensated with their proximity to other major cities and surroundings. You can easily “escape” from there in case you need it.
- Architecture/ aesthetics:
I don’t necessarily live in the most beautiful city in the world, but I do need more than just blocks of concrete and bricks… I HATE with the deepest of my heart the so called “dormitory towns” (Fuenlabrada, Getxo, Dos Hermanas, Torrent, Hospitalet…). They are horrendous and hideous. I can live in a block of bricks and concrete, I cannot live somewhere where the only thing you can distinguish is blocks, blocks and more blocks. I like cities like Burgos, Granada, Oviedo, Logroño, Zaragoza or Valencia… They are not extraordinary beautiful, but they do have a pretty decent historic center and then between the center and the residential areas in the outskirts you can find a lot of avenues, boulevards, parks and pretty decent neighborhoods. You won’t get shocked by their beauty (although in Granada you have which is, for me, the most breathtaking and wonderful monument in the whole country, the Alhambra, but you need to get inside of it and its not something you do on a daily basis), but walking their streets is very pleasant and there is some short of harmony in terms of architecture and aesthetics. I can tolerate living in a dull and bland neighborhood if I can easily get to a pretty decent downtown. There are incredibly beautiful cities like Salamanca, Cáceres, Toledo, Sevilla, Córdoba… but I don’t find any of those especially appealing when it comes to living. I love to visit those cities, but I feel like they lack more dynamism, and for a daily basis I need more than just a pretty beautiful downtown (the first time you might be awed, but after hundreds of times seeing the same buildings, the wow effect disappears).
- Weather:
Finally, here comes the weather… To be honest, this is not the best criteria. In Spain, in general, every city has a horrible weather for this or that reason (it’s funny, because foreigners always talk about the “good weather” of Spain, but there is a difference between visiting and actually living here). We have very rainy cities in the North, pretty cold winters in the whole inner Spain, some of the inner cities also have a very hot summer, the Mediterranean coast is very humid… Cádiz, Huelva and The Canaries are probably the only regions where you cand find the most stable and best weather, as they have mild temperatures the whole year, they are not very rainy and quite sunny. The only problem is humidity, as they are coastal regions. So if it were for the weather, you would have to discard 90% of the country. The best cities for the summer are in the North, whilst the best cities for the winter are in the South. My “favorite” cities are in inner Spain, so the weather sucks. In Burgos, Zaragoza or Logroño you have very cold winters. Burgos in summer is not that warm, but Logroño and, especially, Zaragoza, are like a boiling pot. Other cities that I mentioned are not better… Granada is similar to Zaragoza in this regard: pretty cold and pretty hot depending on the season. Oviedo is very rainy. Valencia is very humid and warm in summer… You will get bad weather at some point, so here you just need to guess whether you prefer cold, rain, wind, humidity or hot… And you will probably have a combo of various phenomena.
In the end, if you have the chance, I think you just need to explore. In some cities I could get an immediate good vibe and my first thought was “I think I can live here”, whilst I had the opposite feeling when visiting other cities… In my case, I think you might have already guessed it, but if I had to pick a city, the battle will be against Burgos, Pamplona, Logroño and Zaragoza. These cities offer, for me, the most balanced combination of my criteria. Plus, all these cities have a vibrant street life and they have a good gastronomy. However, I think I could live pretty happy in most of the Spanish cities, but Madrid, Barcelona. I can deal with all the stuff except with the stress of the big city. I will probably move in the future and, at this point, I think the cities with the best quality of life, for me, are those four.
Burgos:
Pamplona:
Logroño:
Zaragoza:
They are geographically proxy as you can see:
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