I am not, at heart, a travel blogger.
I am a Frenchman who spent thirty years in America, built a life there, and then looked up one day and decided that life no longer quite fit. I grew up in a small village in southwestern France, the kind of place where a twelfth-century church sits at the center of everything and nobody thinks much of it. I moved to the United States at twenty, lived in several corners of the country before eventually settling in the Washington DC area, and stayed long enough to become, in most of the ways that matter, genuinely American too.
Then, in the summer of 2026, my wife and I packed up and moved to Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
Why Spain is a longer answer than this page can hold. The short version: I am a medieval historian by training, and Spain is the one place in Europe where the past didn’t just happen and recede. It accumulated, layer upon layer, and stayed. You hear it, taste it, see it in the architecture. That kind of depth is not something you visit. It is something you live inside, if you’re lucky enough to find the right place.
Alcalá de Henares sealed it on different grounds entirely. A university city founded in 1499 by Cardinal Cisneros, UNESCO-listed, built around arcaded streets and Renaissance stone that has been standing since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and yet full of students, noise, and the ordinary business of daily life. Living history rather than displayed history. The birthplace of Cervantes. The city where Don Quixote was conceived. My wife suggested it. I had never been. We visited, and I understood immediately.
Alcalá & Away is the record of what comes next.
It is not a blog about checking things off a list. It is about going slowly enough to actually understand a place: its history, its people, the particular texture of life in a corner of Spain that most visitors fly over on their way to Madrid. I write about the Comunidad de Madrid first, because that is where I live and what I know most intimately, and I expand outward from there as the roads lead somewhere worth following.
If you are planning a trip to Alcalá or the wider region, you will find practical guidance here, real visiting information, honest recommendations, and the kind of historical context that turns a pretty old building into something genuinely meaningful. If you are thinking about making a move like mine, you will find an honest account of what that actually involves, bureaucracy, cultural adjustment, and all.
And if you simply like reading about places written by someone who cares more about understanding them than photographing them, I think you will feel at home here.
I’m glad you found this. Pull up a chair. There is no rush.