More than a directory. A mate who's been there.
Quick confession before we go any further: there's no Pat. The name is a play on “expat,” and Pat is really all of us who've moved to Spain and had to figure it out as we went. I'm Ross. I moved from London to Palma in 2021, and I built Your Mate Pat after living through the exact mess it's meant to save you from.
Moving to a new country is exciting. It's also, once the novelty wears off, a lot of hard work. The language is different, the paperwork is different, and a hundred small things you never had to think about back home suddenly need sorting. I know, because I got most of them wrong first.
The move was the dream. The weeks that followed were the bureaucracy.
Take the NIE, the identification number every foreigner in Spain needs for more or less everything. Getting one turned into a saga. Appointments were almost impossible to find, and when one finally came through, it fell apart because a single word was missing from one of my documents. One word. Back to the bottom of the queue.
Finding an accountant once I'd registered as autónomo looked simple enough. It wasn't. The one I found had implied he spoke English. He didn't, not really. Three months of Google Translate and emails I couldn't fully follow later, I gave up and started again.
Then the dentist. A week of ringing practices off Google Maps, asking the same question every time. Do you speak English? And getting the same answer every time. A little bit. Which is not what you want to hear with a drill heading for your mouth.
When I finally found the right people, an accountant who actually explained things and a dentist I could talk to, the difference was night and day. That feeling, being properly understood when something matters, is the whole reason this site exists.
Because none of it was unique to me. Every expat I've met here has their own version of the same story, and they all finish it the same way. I wish there'd been one place to find people I could actually talk to.
So I made one. Your Mate Pat is a directory of English-speaking professionals across Spain: the lawyers, accountants, gestors, doctors, dentists and therapists you can get through an appointment with. Built by someone who needed exactly this and couldn't find it.
Spain is a wonderful place to live, and I want to help more people settle in with less of the stress I had at the start. Making the practical side of life easier isn't about switching off from Spanish culture. If anything, it's the opposite. The week you don't spend chasing dentists or decoding tax emails through Google Translate is a week you get back for learning the language, seeing more of the country, and becoming part of where you live.
The point was never to build an English-speaking bubble. It's to help you find your feet.
Right now Your Mate Pat covers six professional categories across ten regions of Spain, with more than 750 professionals listed. The aim is straightforward: to be the first place English-speaking expats think of when they need a professional they can talk to.
I'm adding listings, improving the ones already there, and slowly building something more useful than a plain directory. Something for people who arrived last month and people who arrived last decade.
If you offer services in English, I'd love to list you. And if you're an expat trying to find help, you're in the right place. Welcome.
Palma, Mallorca
