Spain’s happiest city

Brendan Boyle
4 min readApr 22, 2024

This working class city shows that “the nice friend” doesn’t always finish last.

I had to go straight to the comments upon reading the headline tweets.

In a part of the country hooked to fishing, the Happy City Index 2024 ranking Vigo as the ciudad más feliz de España was going to be irresistible bait for the shoals of online trolls.

- “I don’t even want to imagine what the unhappiest city is like.”

- “Whoever did the ranking never had to travel through the city by bus.”

- “It must be since Rafa Benitez (former Celta Vigo manager) left.”

- “What about the six months of rain, three months of Christmas, and spectacular traffic jams.”

Spain is the best in the world at marketing itself to itself, but Spaniards are also elite at self-deprecating humour.

A city situated closer to Portugal than the capital of its region (Santiago de Compostela), Vigo ranks 58th worldwide in the Happy City Index 2024, one place above Bilbao and well ahead of Valencia (106), Barcelona (139), Zaragoza (165), Madrid (192), Málaga (216), and Las Palmas (242).

The nice friend

Located on the Ría de Vigo, Galicia’s biggest city of 300,000 people doesn’t particularly scream happiness, but that’s very much on brand for the northwest corner of Spain. “Galicia is one of those places where people live very well indeed but don’t really feel the need to shout about it,” wrote Annie Bennett in The Telegraph, “which might explain why, despite being a popular holiday destination for Spaniards, relatively few Britons make it there.”

In the eyes of my friends in Pontevedra (30km away), Vigo is more No-Go because of the noise and stress of traffic crawling up and down narrow streets. And that brings us to the city’s topography: “As a city, Vigo isn’t measured in square kilometres, it’s measured in hills,” wrote Lucía Taboada in Como siempre, lo de siempre, a book dedicated to Celta Vigo, the city’s football team.

“The only people that complain about Vigo’s traffic and steep streets are out-of-towners,” Juampa Pérez, a Vigo local, tells me. “For us that’s the chaos in which we’ve been brought up. We always joke that learning to drive in Vigo allows one to handle himself pretty fine almost anywhere in the world.”

With the hills in this part of Galicia, everything that goes down has to come back up again. For the car-free, there’s never an excuse to skip leg day.

Vigo is a working class city with automaker Stellantis (Peugeot, Citroën) driving the local economy. Abel Caballero, of Spain’s socialist party (PSOE), has been city mayor since 2007. In the most recent regional elections, where the conservative Partido Popular steamrolled its way to a fifth consecutive absolute majority, Vigo was the only city in Galicia where the PP failed to take gold, finishing behind the left-wing Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG).

Two months of torture

Caballero is what Spaniards would call a personaje, a character. He makes the national headlines every August when announcing plans for the city’s next Christmas extravaganza while the rest of Spain is on the beach. Last year he claimed that Vigo, along with New York, London, Paris, and Rome formed part of a “Christmas Superleague.”

For eight weeks starting mid-November, the living rooms of downtown flats in the pop-up Las Vigo are caught in the frenetic festive headlights while Mariah Carey greets traumatised locals coming home from work every evening. Elbowing through the crowds with bags of groceries is a part-time job in itself.

Christmas tree measuring contests with other mayors aside, Vigo’s big rival is the city where I’m writing these words: A Coruña.

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Brendan Boyle

Irish - living in Galicia. Write about Spain, its cities and culture; real people and places; current affairs. Supporter of real journalism.