Spain's happiest city
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. “Vigo works and A Coruña has fun,” says the saying. The weather is better in Vigo, but A Coruña has an understated swag that doesn’t feel all that different to the upper-class barrios of Madrid, Barcelona, and San Sebastián.
Home to the brand behind Zara, Bershka, Pull & Bear and others, a quick people-watching walk from A Coruña’s Marina Avenue to the elegant Ensanche zone confirms Inditex’s indelible influence on the city. People dress well - even for the rain. “If A Coruña is the beautiful girl of Galicia, then Vigo is the nice friend,” wrote Lucía Taboada.
The Financial Times compared Inditex to the TV show Succession, “but with friendly Spanish people, delicious food and better clothes.” If A Coruña is Succession, then Vigo - with widespread dereliction and some run-down streets running down to gritty docks - is a different HBO production: The Wire Season 2.
Reasons to be cheerful
The gentrifiers were getting giddy when The Times declared Vigo “Spain's coolest city,” a title that’s usually a precursor to €1.50 coffees in old school bars giving way to €4.50 caramel iced lattes and badly-spelt names on plastic cups.
Nonetheless, the premise of the piece was on the money: as more parts of Spain suffer longer and more extreme waves of unbearable heat, cities like Vigo in the cooler north will attract climate refugees. Investment capital will follow the talent.
Meanwhile, Vigo locals watching news headlines of winter water shortages and restrictions in Catalonia and Andalusia are happy where they are. Signs with big red buckets in Barcelona metro stations declare that “water doesn’t fall from the sky.” At one point during Vigo’s most recent autumn it rained for 33 days straight.
Besides the eight weeks of All I Want for Christmas Is You, life in Galicia is lived with the volume turned down. Staying true to the Galician concept of sentidiño (using common sense), politicians generally get on with doing politics. Here I don’t see the tension and partisanship that leads to gridlock in other regions. Furthermore, the Xunta de Galicia is the only regional parliament in Spain where the extreme right party, Vox, has failed to win a single seat.
Gallegos have free pre-school education for children aged 0-3. They wait almost 2.5 days less than the average Spaniard to be seen (for free) by their GP and 61 days less for surgery on the public healthcare system. Things could be better - Christmas could be shorter - but looking across the country, things could be a lot worse.
In 2023, Vigo was voted the cleanest city in Galicia, and third overall nationwide. Anyone who has been to Spain will know the huge amount of resources dedicated to maintaining public space - with lived-in cities there’s a much greater incentive and expectation to take care of plazas and parks.
Being the nice friend, there’s no pressure on Vigo to keep up appearances. As some of A Coruña’s streets show, beauty fades. It may rain for half the year, but Vigueses are able to enjoy the summer sun when it shines instead of running for cover like Madrileños and Sevillanos.
The August evenings are long and balmy, perfect for wandering the sloping streets of the Casco Vello (old town), passing waiters zipping out to terraces with ice-cold Estrella Galicias and Albariño wine and hissing plates of prawns sizzling in a broth of olive oil and sliced garlic.
In the pursuit of happiness Vigo, it seems, isn’t bothered trying to reinvent the wheel. With some of the best seafood and beaches in Spain on its doorstep, there’s no need.
Vigo recommendations
The Othilio Bar (Great food)
Restaurante El Temporal (Excellent quality/value)
Malauva Wine Bar
Nakez Coffee (a nice view with breakfast)
Vaidhe (cool artisan gift store)
Re-Read (second-hand bookstore)