From Málaga to Galicia and Why We Moved North

There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over a car when you’ve just driven away from the only place you’ve ever really called home, and it isn’t an empty silence at all, but a full one, crowded with everything nobody can quite bring themselves to say.

Ours lasted for about eleven minutes.

Then the chicken started complaining, one of the dogs sat on a toddler, the toddler made her feelings about this extremely clear, and somewhere in the back row a small, outraged voice announced that she needed the bathroom right now, even though we had stopped for exactly that reason not a quarter of an hour before. And just like that, the great emotional farewell to our old life dissolved into the noise and chaos and warmth of the new one, which, looking back, is exactly how it should have been.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you how we got there, because it’s a story that involves a renovation, a newborn, a nine-hour train ride, a mountain of paperwork, and the biggest leap of faith either of us has ever taken.

A British girl raised on Andalusian sun

I’m British on paper, but Spain is the only home I’ve ever really known. My family moved to Málaga when I was two years old, and I grew up there among whitewashed villages and dusty hillsides and summers so hot the air shimmered above the road. I learned Spanish in the playground and English at the kitchen table, ate my weight in churros every winter, and spent my whole childhood believing that every sky in the world must be that impossibly bright, cloudless blue.

Phil, on the other hand, is from Wisconsin. He arrived in Málaga in 2016 to study graphic design, fully intending to finish his degree, have a lovely adventure and head home to the cheese and the snow and the Green Bay Packers.

He never left.

Partly because he fell in love with Spain, and partly, if I’m allowed to say so, because he met me. (He’ll tell you it was the weather. He’s lying.)

Our first little homestead

When we bought our first place, in the hills outside Málaga, we didn’t so much buy a house as adopt a project. It hadn’t been lived in for nearly a decade. There was no electricity, the plumbing was basic at best, and what we’d imagined as a bit of sprucing up turned, almost immediately, into a full renovation of the entire house, the kind that swallows years of weekends and every spare cent and a fair amount of your sanity along with them.

But we did it, and we made it ours. We had fruit trees that sagged with oranges and figs, a handful of vines, a vegetable patch that fed us through the cooler months, and chickens who ran the place like a tiny feathered mafia. For a while we had pigs, too, who stole my heart and regularly destroyed my fences, often on the same afternoon.

It was there that we learned almost everything we know: how to coax food from dry, stubborn soil, how to preserve a glut of fruit before the heat turned it, and how to keep animals alive through a summer that seemed to stretch on forever. It was there, too, that our family grew, one daughter and then another, until our little house on the hill was bursting at the seams with small people and muddy boots and an ever-growing mountain of laundry.

I thought, for a long time, that we’d stay there forever.

The slow realization

It didn’t happen all at once. It never does, I think, with the big decisions. It was more like a series of small, quiet moments that piled up on top of one another until one day you look at the pile and realize it has quietly become an answer.

There was the water. Anyone who’s lived in southern Spain these last few years will know how hard the droughts have been. We watched the reservoirs shrink and the restrictions tighten, and every summer we found ourselves rationing water for the garden and the animals, worrying in a low, constant way that never quite went away about what would happen if the rains didn’t come again. It’s hard to dream about growing more food when you’re not sure there’ll be enough water for what you’ve already got.

There was the land, or rather the lack of it. We’d outgrown our little plot. We wanted space for more animals, for a proper orchard, for a vegetable garden that could actually feed a growing family, and for the kind of farm we’d been dreaming about late at night for years. In Málaga, that kind of space was either impossibly expensive or impossibly far from everything.

There was the dream of a real farm business, something that could one day support us and not just feed us. Phil had started sketching plans for cattle and a working farm of our own, and the more we talked about it, the clearer it became that it would never fit where we were.

And there was the life we wanted for the girls: something slower, greener and more rooted, with room to roam, seasons that actually change, and a community where neighbors still stop to chat over the fence.

One evening in May 2025, sitting on the porch in the heat with the cicadas screaming and the hills burnt gold around us, Phil looked at me and said, “What if we went north?”

And instead of laughing, I said, “Where?”

That was the night we decided.

The plan (and how life ignored it)

We had a very sensible plan, which in hindsight should have been our first warning.

We’d finish the last of the renovation on our Málaga house over the summer, list it for sale in the fall, and then, once it sold, take our time finding the right farm up north. One step at a time. Calm. Orderly. Grown-up.

So we spent that summer painting and fixing and finishing, and I spent it growing an increasingly enormous belly, because baby number three was due in the fall. And in the evenings, once the girls were finally asleep, the two of us would sit squinting at listings of stone houses and overgrown fields across Galicia, trying to work out whether “rustic charm” meant “lovely old beams” or “no roof,” and swearing to each other, over and over, that whatever we bought next, we were never doing another full renovation.

Again and again, our search pulled us toward Galicia. It had everything Málaga couldn’t offer us anymore: rain, green, and land that was within reach of an ordinary family. It had old farmhouses waiting for someone to love them again, and support for young farmers wanting to start out. The more we read, the more it felt like it was calling us.

And then, in October, the week I gave birth to our youngest daughter, I found it.

The red house

I remember it perfectly. I was sitting up in bed with a brand-new baby asleep on my chest, scrolling on my phone with one thumb in that strange, floaty, sleepless haze of the first days postpartum, and there it was.

A typical Galician farmhouse, painted red, with crisp white frames around the windows. Barns, plural, and lots of them. Land rolling off in every direction. And, crucially, a house that was livable. Move-in ready. A little dated, sure, with some questionable tile choices and a kitchen that had clearly seen a few decades, but not a ruin, not a project, not a house with no electricity and a decade of silence in its walls.

I showed Phil. He went very quiet, which is what he does when he’s excited and trying not to be.

We had not listed our house yet. We had a newborn. We had no business whatsoever looking at farms on the other side of the country.

I messaged the realtor anyway.

Nine hours on a train with a newborn

If you have ever been postpartum, you’ll understand when I say that the idea of traveling the length of Spain two or three weeks after giving birth was, objectively, unhinged.

I did it anyway.

I packed a bag that was roughly ninety percent baby supplies and ten percent snacks, strapped my tiny daughter to my chest, and boarded a train in Málaga for the nine-hour journey north to Galicia, while Phil stayed home with the big girls.

And I need you to know that my baby was the absolute star of that train. She charmed the entire carriage. Grandmothers cooed at her across the aisle, a businessman who’d looked thoroughly grumpy at the start of the journey ended up making faces at her for the better part of an hour, and every time I walked down the carriage to stretch my legs, people smiled at her like she was a little piece of sunshine that had wandered aboard.

I, meanwhile, was exhausted. Bone-deep, leaking, aching, running-on-fumes exhausted, in that particular way only the first weeks after birth can make you. But I watched the landscape slide past the window, the dry brown south giving way mile by mile to the flat gold middle of the country and then, slowly, to green, and somewhere deep under the tiredness, I felt a flicker of something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Hope, I think. Or maybe recognition.

The viewing

The viewing went beautifully, almost suspiciously so. The red house was even lovelier in person, solid and warm and quietly welcoming, with its barns full of possibilities, its land stretching off into the mist, and an entire vineyard spread out right at the front beside the house, row upon row of old vines, as though the whole place had been waiting for someone to come home. I walked through every room with the baby asleep on my chest, trying very hard to be sensible and ask practical questions about roofs and wells and septic tanks, while a very unsensible voice inside me kept whispering this is it, this is it, this is it.

I was barely back in Málaga when the realtor texted. There was a lot of interest in the property, he said. Other people were looking.

Phil and I looked at each other across the kitchen table, over a pile of baby laundry, and we just knew.

The leap

So we did the bravest, most reckless thing we have ever done. We paid the deposit on the red house before our own house had even sold.

The contract gave us three months to complete the purchase. That same week, the week of my viewing, our Málaga house finally went up for sale, and the clock started ticking.

The hardest months

I want to be honest with you about this part, because it would be easy to tell this story as a lovely, sun-dappled adventure, and it wasn’t. Not all of it.

Three months came and went, and our Málaga house hadn’t sold. The seller of the red house kindly gave us an extension of another three months, and in February, like a small miracle, we found our buyers: the kindest couple you could ever hope to meet, who walked through our house and fell head over heels in love with it, with every wall we’d rebuilt and every tree we’d planted, in exactly the way we once had.

We thought we were nearly there. And then, right at the end of that second extension, we discovered that our Málaga house had a whole tangle of paperwork that needed sorting before the sale could go through, paperwork we’d had no idea about, the kind that doesn’t care one bit about your deadlines. We missed the second deadline, too.

At the same time, my dad was in the hospital. (He’s okay now, thank goodness.)

I don’t really know how to describe those months except to say that they were the most anxious and depressed I have ever been in my life. I had a tiny baby who still woke through the night, two little girls who needed their mummy, a father in a hospital bed, two houses hanging in the balance at opposite ends of the country, and a deposit we stood to lose if it all fell apart. Most nights I lay awake doing sums on the ceiling, wondering whether we’d gambled everything on a dream and lost. Some days it felt like I was holding my breath for weeks at a time.

If you’re in a season like that right now, I see you. It does pass, even when it feels like it won’t.

What got us through, in the end, was people.

It turned out the seller of the red house also had some paperwork of her own to sort out, and so, rather than anyone walking away, we all agreed together to give it another three months. And our buyers in Málaga, those wonderful, patient people, stood by us through every delay.

They worked on their side of the paperwork while I worked on ours, and for months we were in constant contact, messaging and calling for hours every single day, chasing documents and signatures and answers from offices that never seemed to pick up the phone. Phil and I both agree that for a good stretch of that sale, I spent more time talking to our buyers than I did talking to him. He’d walk into the kitchen and find me on the phone with them again, and he’d just smile, make me a cup of tea, and quietly take the baby.

It was a team effort in the truest sense, two families on opposite sides of a sale, quietly pulling in the same direction.

And in those last three months, everything finally fell into place. We closed the sale on our Málaga house, the seller of the red house wrapped up her paperwork at almost the same moment, as if the whole thing had been choreographed by someone with a very dry sense of humor, and our buyers got the keys to their dream home.

That part still makes me cry a little, in the good way. The house we brought back to life with our own hands went to people who love it every bit as much as we did.

We did it. All of us did.

I still can’t quite believe it. It was such a risk, the kind you’d tell a friend not to take. But sometimes, I think, you just know, and then you hold on through the hard part until the knowing turns into keys in your hand.

Bittersweet

I won’t pretend that leaving was easy, because it wasn’t.

Málaga wasn’t just where we lived. It was where I grew up and learned who I was, where Phil and I fell in love, and where our daughters came into the world. It was where I knew the name of every lady at the market, where the light fell on the kitchen floor at four in the afternoon, and which tree on our land gave the sweetest figs. And it was the house we’d brought back to life with our own hands, every wall and wire and pipe of it. Saying goodbye felt like saying goodbye to a version of myself, and I cried more than once while packing, usually over something ridiculous like a mismatched mug or the height marks on the pantry door.

But underneath the sadness there was something else too, quietly fizzing away like a bottle of something homemade: excitement, possibility, the thrill of a blank page and a brand-new chapter, of going toward something rather than simply staying where we were.

Bittersweet is the right word, I think. It was both, all at once, all the way through.

The great migration

At the end of August, we finally set off, not in a moving van but in our trusty seven-seater Chrysler Grand Voyager, which has carried us through many adventures but never anything quite like this.

Allow me to paint you a picture of what was inside that car as we pulled away from our old life and pointed ourselves north.

Phil and me in the front, running on coffee and adrenaline. Three girls under the age of five in the back, surrounded by snacks and blankets and books and a small mountain of stuffed animals deemed absolutely essential to the journey. Two medium-sized dogs wedged into whatever space remained, panting cheerfully and occasionally sitting on someone.

And Lucy.

Lucy deserves her own introduction. Lucy is a three-month-old Silkie and Ayam Cemani cross, a small, fluffy, entirely black chicken with a great deal to say, and our eldest considers her, without question, to be her baby. Leaving Lucy behind was never an option; there were tears at the mere suggestion. So Lucy rode north in a box on our eldest’s lap and spent the better part of the journey making her opinions about long-distance travel extremely clear.

We stopped often, as you do with three small children, two dogs and a chicken, to feed people and walk dogs and change diapers and reassure Lucy. And every time we got back into the car, the landscape outside had shifted a little more, the burnt gold of the south giving way to the wide flat plains of the middle of Spain until, slowly and almost without our noticing, the hills began to rise and the world turned green, a deep, soft, rain-washed green that I’d only glimpsed once before, through the window of a train, with a newborn asleep on my chest.

Somewhere in the north, as the light was beginning to fade, our eldest pressed her face to the window and whispered, “Mummy, it’s like the pictures in my books.”

And it was.

Where we are now

It’s been about seven weeks since we pulled into the drive in front of the red house, past the vineyard heavy with grapes, the car full of sleeping children and dogs and one very indignant chicken. The house is still full of boxes, the barns need more work than either of us likes to think about, and our Spanish is getting a serious workout in a region where half the conversations happen in Galician.

There have been surprises, of course. We arrived to find a farm license with just two days left to live, and somehow ended up with two elderly sheep, which is a whole other story. We’ve met our first neighbors, made our first bottles of grape juice, and learned that in Galicia, “a bit of rain” is a phrase that can mean almost anything.

Phil is in his element, out in the barns every chance he gets, sketching plans for cattle and fences and a future that’s finally starting to take shape. The girls are wild and muddy and happy. The baby who charmed an entire train is about to turn one. And Lucy has made a full recovery from the journey and rules the henhouse with an iron claw.

And me? I’m learning to love the rain. I’m learning a new rhythm and a new landscape, and how to put down roots in soil that’s softer and darker and wetter than anything I’ve ever known. Some mornings I still wake with that old tightness in my chest, the leftover habit of months spent bracing for bad news, and then I hear the hens and the rain on the roof and remember where I am.

Some days I miss the sun so much it aches, and some days I stand at the kitchen window watching the mist roll off the fields and can’t believe this is really ours.

Most days, if I’m honest, it’s both.

And I think that’s exactly how it’s supposed to feel.

With love from the green, green north,

Milly x

P.S. Have you ever taken a leap that felt completely mad at the time? Tell me about it in the comments. I’d love to know I’m not the only one who’s bought a farm with a newborn strapped to her chest.