Spain, a good place to live?
by ViTo • April 21, 2006 No commentsAlmost all the spanish people I’ve met since I am living in Germany, come to terms with leaving temporarily their country, but I haven’t met anybody yet who declares he/she wants to live in Germany indefinitely. Most accept the fact that the Erasmus experience has a due date and quickly return home. I guess the fact that on a monday 10th of April it snows non-stop during the whole moring has something to do with it. Others, trying to maximize our chances do not discard any option and accept the option of living in a foreign country for a longer period of time. Maybe 4, 5 or 6 years, but we still want to go back to our native land eventually. Why does that happen? Is life better in Spain? Actually, yesterday a yearly study which ranks world cities according to their quality of life was published by HR Mercer consulting. The first two spanish cities, as you may have guessed, are Barcelona and Madrid in the positions 44 and 45 respectively! Having read up to this point, you can imagine how suprised I was by these results. I have never seriously thought what rank Barcelona should have, yet I am quite confident it should be higher than the 44th. HR Mercer mentions terrorism as one of the issues not resolved in Spain which drags both cities significatively down. The truth is after living in Barcelona for 24 years I never had any fear / concern about this matter. Yet, I understand this is a serious issue which has to be considered. Here are the results of the study.
Seven out of the top ten cities are european (3 swiss, 3 german and 1 austrian). At the top of the list there are 2 swiss metropolis: Zürich and Genève which repeat their last year’s rank. I never had the pleasure of visiting Switzerland, so I cannot question the results, yet being a country so small and having 3 cities in the top ten, the wealth must be really high. Germany also has 3 cities in the top ten, and one of them: München, I have visited several times besides having some friends living there. I am not implying their wealth is not higher than ours (in fact it is, and much higher), yet I can’t help but wonder if that is the most important aspect. As you may already know, besides spending summer after summer in our cities and beaches there are many germans whom once retired buy a property in Spain and start to live there. I see the opposite situation quite unlikely.
Then, where do you think people really live better?
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