Where do you go to meet the people who actually run this economy?
Four times in September, either I or someone from LiveGalicia sat in a room in Vigo where Galicia’s business world was talking to itself. Each event had its own agenda, but by the end I kept circling the same question, the one anyone working remotely from here runs into sooner or later. Where do you go to meet the people who actually run this economy?
The Círculo de Empresarios de Galicia hosted the first on September 3, the launch of the ninth edition of ViaExterior. It is a free internationalisation accelerator run by the Consorcio de la Zona Franca de Vigo. Galician small and mid-sized companies get mentors who study the regulations, taxes and competitors of whatever country they want to sell in, and the work happens in person on Friday afternoons from November to June. David Regades, the State delegate at the Consorcio, said about ninety percent of participants over the first eight editions went on to sell in their target markets. This year’s cohort has twenty companies. Applications closed on September 30, so treat this as a preview of the next round, and read the eligibility rules before assuming it fits you, since the programme is built for Galician companies. For a remote worker who already sells to clients abroad, the part worth noticing is the attitude. Selling beyond the region is treated as an ordinary ambition here, with public money behind it.
A week later I was back in the same building for MAPA_E, the Círculo’s yearly look at the entrepreneurship and investment ecosystem. It was the fourth edition, subtitled as a move from the shared map to collective action. Carolina Rodríguez of Enisa said the firm has around 300 financing operations in Galicia and that Galicia ranks sixth in Spain, a ranking several speakers pushed back on. Lalo García of HubIN said Barcelona lets you simply go and see an ecosystem, while Galicia sends you on something like a Camino de Santiago to find yours. The morning’s case study was Ultreia Galicia, a network of more than 150 entities whose members keep their own identities and agree to be reachable through it. LiveGalicia is one of them. My own takeaway was simpler than the programme’s. The resources exist, they are scattered across a lot of organisations, and the quickest way I know to find them is to go where those organisations meet.
On September 25, Dorothee Müller, who leads partnerships at LiveGalicia, went to Vertical Summit at the Palacio de la Oliva, its fourth edition. Local press counted more than two hundred professionals. She is a foreigner and self-employed in Galicia herself, and her write-up starts with canned fish. Some of the talks traced the history of Galicia’s canning industry, which was not what she had planned to learn that morning. Around those talks she met industrialists, marketers, family firms and a fifteen-year-old founder who has run his own company since he was eight. Her conclusion was that networking means getting far enough outside your own bubble for something unexpected to reach you. A newcomer who only talks to other newcomers will have a hard time getting that far.
The fourth room was the MARCO museum on September 29, for the fourth VigoEmprende gala. VigoEmprende is the Concello de Vigo’s free entrepreneurship programme, and the coverage I read says it has helped drive 1,401 business projects since 2020. LiveGalicia is one of the projects it has accompanied, and this was our second year at the gala. The mayor said the programme costs roughly a quarter of a million euros a year and called it money well spent. Tegra took the overall prize. In the creativity category, Las coordenadas de Vigo won with a vending machine that sells a small printed photograph of a Vigo corner, along with the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. As Peaky Branders came third with a campaign that made deliberate mistakes in Galician so that people would stop fearing to speak it. RodriDesign, a design and web agency in Vigo, won the consolidated project award, and its founder, Rodrigo García, said in the video that about eighty percent of its clients are in the United States. That is a Vigo agency, honoured by the city, whose clients are mostly an ocean away. If you work remotely, it should sound familiar.
The gala left one question open. In 2025, all of the net growth in Galicia’s self-employment registrations came from people of foreign origin, according to UPTA España and AGTAMAR. Nothing presented that night, and nothing in the coverage I have read, says how many of the people VigoEmprende has accompanied arrived from somewhere else, or how many reached the finalist stage. I plan to ask the Concello.
Most of what I have described is in Spanish, some of it in Galician, and very little of it is translated. Startup Galicia is the exception I know of. Its website is in Galician, but its board has people who can work in English, so a conversation is possible even when the page is not. Part of why LiveGalicia exists is to close that gap. If you have been working from Galicia for a year and have not yet stood in one of these rooms, that is the next thing to fix. Pick the next event and go. Introduce yourself in whatever Spanish you have, and say what you do.
Sources
Círculo de Empresarios de Galicia. (2026, September 10). #MAPA_E 2026: Ecosistema de emprendimiento e inversión de Galicia, en construcción, 4ª edición [Event programme and participant list]. https://circulo.gal/categorias/mapa_e-2026/
Carballo, A. (2026, September 12). Galicia gana peso tecnológico y su ecosistema emprendedor se prepara para dar el salto [Galicia gains technological weight and its entrepreneurial ecosystem prepares to make the leap]. Diario de Santiago. https://www.diariodesantiago.es/galicia/galicia-gana-peso-tecnologico-y-su-ecosistema-emprendedor-se-prepara-para-dar-el-salto/
Feijoo Covelo, A. (2026, September 14). Galicia es sexta en España en empresas tecnológicas [Galicia ranks sixth in Spain in technology companies]. Mundiario. https://www.mundiario.com/articulo/eurorregion/galicia-es-sexta-espana-empresas-tecnologicas/20260914034701440980.html
Picatoste, M. (2026, September 3). Vigo’s Zona Franca opens the ninth edition of the ViaExterior internationalisation accelerator. El Español (Treintayseis).
Atlántico Diario. (2026, September 4). Zona Franca launches ViaExterior 9 to support business expansion.
Consorcio de la Zona Franca de Vigo. (n.d.). ViaExterior [Programme page]. viaexterior.com
El Español (Treintayseis). (2026, September 21). Vigo se prepara para uno de los eventos del año: Así será Vertical Summit 2026 [Vigo prepares for one of the events of the year: This is what Vertical Summit 2026 will be like]. https://www.elespanol.com/treintayseis/economia/empresas/20260921/vigo-prepara-eventos-ano-vertical-summit/1003744390515_0.html
VigoÉ. (2026, September 24). Vertical Summit reúne en Vigo a más de 200 profesionales para impulsar el networking y poner en valor el talento empresarial [Vertical Summit brings together more than 200 professionals in Vigo]. https://www.vigoe.es/vigo/economia/vertical-summit-reune-en-vigo-a-mas-de-200-profesionales-para-impulsar-el-networking-y-poner-en-valor-el-talento-empresarial/
VigoÉ. (2026, September 26). Vertical Summit se consagra en su cuarta edición como el punto de encuentro del tejido empresarial gallego [Vertical Summit establishes itself in its fourth edition as the meeting point of Galicia’s business fabric]. https://www.vigoe.es/vigo/economia/vertical-summit-se-consagra-en-su-cuarta-edicion-como-el-punto-de-encuentro-del-tejido-empresarial-gallego/
Redacción. (2026, September 29). VigoEmprende celebra su cuarta gala tras impulsar 1.401 proyectos empresariales desde 2020 [VigoEmprende celebrates its fourth gala after driving 1,401 business projects since 2020]. VigoHoy. https://vigohoy.es/vigoemprende-celebra-su-cuarta-gala-tras-impulsar-1-401-proyectos-empresariales-desde-2020/
Fernández, S. (2026, September 30). VigoEmprende ayudó este año a más de 150 proyectos [VigoEmprende helped more than 150 projects this year]. Atlántico. https://www.atlantico.net/vigo/vigoemprende-ayudo-ano-150-proyectos_1_20260930-4432484.html
UPTA España & AGTAMAR. (2025). Data on 2025 growth in RETA self-employment registrations by origin, as cited in prior LiveGalicia reporting.
Touza-Medina, Á.-J. (2026, September 3). Attendee notes and audio recording, ViaExterior ninth-edition launch, Círculo de Empresarios de Galicia, Vigo [Unpublished].
Touza-Medina, Á.-J. (2026, September 10). Attendee notes and audio recordings, #MAPA_E 2026, Círculo de Empresarios de Galicia, Vigo [Unpublished].
Touza-Medina, Á.-J. (2026, September 29). Audio recording and transcript, Cuarta Gala VigoEmprende, MARCO, Vigo [Unpublished].
