Homesickness in Spain is more common than most expats admit, and more complicated than most articles about it suggest. If you moved here with a plan, with excitement, with reasons that still make sense on paper, and you are still sitting with a weight you cannot quite name, that is not weakness or ingratitude. It is a predictable response to a real loss. This post explains what is actually happening when you feel homesick, why it can persist long after you expected it to have passed, and when it crosses into something that deserves professional attention.
Homesickness is not just missing home
Most advice about homesickness treats it as a logistics problem. Call your family more. Find British food. Join an expat group. Keep busy. Those things can help. But they do not touch the deeper layer of what is actually happening.
Homesickness is not only missing a place or the people in it. It is missing the version of yourself that existed there. The one who was known. The one who did not have to explain their sense of humour or translate their personality into a second language. The one whose history was visible in the faces around them.
When you leave that context, part of your identity loses its footing. The Spain you live in now is real and full and often genuinely good, but you are also navigating it without the scaffolding of familiarity that used to hold your sense of self in place. That is a real loss, and it does not resolve by staying busy.
Why homesickness in Spain can linger longer than you expect
The first months in Spain have a particular quality. The novelty absorbs the disorientation. There is too much to figure out, too much that is new and interesting, for the loss to settle. Many people describe this period as surprisingly manageable, even exciting.
Then it shifts. The novelty passes. You have figured out the bureaucracy, found your neighbourhood, learned which supermarket to use. And that is when homesickness often arrives properly, sometimes a year or more after the move, when everything is technically in place and you still feel off.
What has happened is that the cognitive demands of adaptation have decreased, and the emotional reality has space to surface. Research on acculturation by psychologist John Berry (1997) shows that the adaptation period for most migrants is measured in years, not months, and that people who feel pressure to abandon their connection to their country of origin in order to integrate fully tend to have significantly worse psychological outcomes than those who allow both identities to coexist.
In other words: trying to get over it, to fully become a Spain person and leave your old life behind, often makes things worse. The homesickness is not something to overcome. It is something to integrate.
The difference between homesickness and expat depression
These two things can look similar from the inside, and they can coexist, but they are different and the difference matters for what you do next.
Homesickness is a longing. It has an object: home, family, a version of yourself you have left behind. On its own, it is painful but it does not necessarily impair your functioning. Most people feel homesick at specific moments: holidays, family events missed, a particular song, the smell of something familiar. Between those moments, they are largely able to function.
Expat depression is more pervasive. It affects your capacity to work, to enjoy things, to maintain relationships, to sleep. It does not lift when circumstances improve. If your low mood is persistent, lasting more than two or three weeks, if it is affecting your daily functioning, if you notice you have lost interest in things that used to matter, that is when what you are experiencing has likely moved beyond ordinary homesickness.
The two can also feed each other. Homesickness that goes unacknowledged, that you try to push through or dismiss as irrational, can deepen over time into something more entrenched. That is one of the reasons it is worth paying attention to it earlier rather than waiting until it becomes impossible to ignore.
If what you are reading here sounds more like depression than homesickness, the post on expat depression in Spain covers that in more detail.
What Viktor Frankl’s work adds to this
I trained in logotherapy, the psychotherapy developed by Viktor Frankl, and I find it offers something specific to homesickness that other frameworks do not.
Frankl’s core insight was that human beings are not primarily driven by pleasure or the avoidance of pain. They are driven by the search for meaning. And one of the richest sources of meaning in any life is connection: to people, to place, to a community that knows who you are.
When you move to another country, you do not just lose proximity to the people you love. You lose a whole web of meaning that was held in that proximity. The coffee shop you went to on Sunday mornings. The street you could walk with your eyes closed. The understanding that you did not have to earn every interaction from scratch.
What logotherapy offers is a way to work with that loss not by trying to replace it or get over it, but by finding meaning in it. The grief of leaving somewhere you love is a form of love. It tells you something about what matters to you. And that, what matters to you, is something you can carry and build around wherever you are.
This is not a technique. It is a different way of relating to the experience. And in my clinical work with expats in Spain, it is often more useful than any practical strategy.
When homesickness in Spain is worth taking seriously
Most expats experience some degree of homesickness. That alone is not a reason to seek therapy. But these are the signs that what you are dealing with deserves more attention than self-help.
It has been more than six months and the feeling is not diminishing, or it comes and goes but always returns with the same intensity. It is affecting your ability to work, to enjoy your life in Spain, or to maintain close relationships. You find yourself thinking persistently about going back, not as a considered decision but as an escape route that your mind keeps returning to. You feel that you cannot talk about it, because the people around you either do not understand or would interpret it as a failure of the move. You notice that you are numbing the feeling rather than processing it, through alcohol, overwork, staying very busy, or disconnecting.
None of these means something is wrong with you. They mean that what you are carrying is heavier than can reasonably be managed alone, and that the right support would help.
What therapy for homesickness in Spain actually looks like
There is no standard protocol for homesickness because homesickness is not a diagnosis. What therapy offers is a space to do something that most expats do not have elsewhere: speak honestly about the loss, without editing it for an audience that might not understand.
In my practice, I work with a combination of IFS (Internal Family Systems) and logotherapy. IFS is useful here because homesickness often involves parts of you in conflict: the part that chose Spain and wants to make it work, the part that still belongs to where you came from, the part that feels guilty for not being happier, the part that is exhausted from carrying all of this alone. IFS allows you to work with all of those parts without any one of them having to win.
Logotherapy is useful because it works at the level of meaning. Not “how do I manage these feelings” but “what does this experience tell me about what matters to me, and how do I live from that, here?”
Sessions are 60 minutes, in English, and available in person in Valencia and Madrid, or online for anyone in Spain or internationally. If you are unsure whether this is what you need, a first session is a conversation and nothing more is required.
You can find more about working with expats in Spain on the therapy for expats page, or read the guide to finding an English-speaking therapist in Spain if you are still in the early stages of figuring out what kind of support makes sense.
If you would like to explore whether working together makes sense, you can reach me through the contact page.
Frequently asked questions about homesickness in Spain
Yes. Research on acculturation consistently shows that emotional adjustment to living abroad takes longer than most people expect, often two to three years for a stable sense of belonging to develop. Feeling homesick after a year is not a sign that you made the wrong choice or that something has gone wrong.
Loneliness is the absence of connection: the feeling of not having people around who know you. Homesickness is a longing for something specific: a place, a community, a version of yourself that existed elsewhere. You can be lonely in Spain and homesick while surrounded by people. They often coexist but they are not the same experience and they are not resolved in the same way.
It can. Homesickness that is persistent, not acknowledged, and complicated by isolation or loss of purpose can deepen into depression over time. If your low mood is affecting your daily functioning and has lasted more than two weeks, it is worth speaking to a professional.
Yes, particularly when homesickness involves a deeper question of identity or meaning, which it often does when you have lived abroad for an extended period. Practical strategies can help with the surface experience. Therapy helps with what is underneath: the grief of leaving, the identity shift of becoming someone between two places, and the question of how to build a life that feels genuinely yours in a country that is not where you started.
The best options are international therapy directories, direct searches for bilingual psychologists in your city, and asking in expat community groups. The guide to finding an English-speaking therapist in Spain covers the process in detail, including how to check credentials and what to look for in the first session.
Health disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute clinical advice. If you are in crisis or need immediate support, contact the Spanish mental health crisis line on 024, the emotional support line on 717 003 717, or emergency services on 112.
Talí Uribe is a bilingual psychologist (EN/ES) with practices in Valencia and Madrid. She holds IFS Level 1 certification (IFS Institute, 2025) and a diploma in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis (Viktor Frankl Institute, 2022). She has over 20 years of clinical experience working with expats, professionals, and individuals navigating major life transitions.