Retirement migrants under the Covid crisis

Retirement migration is understood as a form of lifestyle migration that people may perform in after their working years. It could be internal or international, but it always involves a move towards places considered to be more adequate for developing social life, outdoor activities and a more hedonistic (rather than productive) type of life. International retirement migration within Europe mostly consists of people moving from Central (UK, Germany) and Northern Europe (Scandinavia) to Southern countries (Spain, Portugal, Malta). Spain is one of the main destination countries for international retirement migration. It is difficult to quantify the number of elderly Europeans living in Spain because many of them never register as residents, but conservative estimations suggest that at least one million elderly Europeans are now living in the Spanish coastline. Among them, British and Germans represent the largest groups. In this paper we provide novel information about the strategies developed by retirement migrants in Spain during the Covid-crisis that started in March 2020. Do most of them returned to their home countries? What types of help or support used those who stayed in Spain? How the Social Services managed to provide help for those with no registration in Spain? We aim to answer these questions by means of ethnographic case-studies in five Spanish municipalities that represent different types of “Retirement Migration Places”. The case studies will be carried out in June-July 2021 and are part of the fieldwork of a large research project on the relationship between Retirement Migration and Local Social Services in Spain. The project is based at Complutense University Madrid and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science.