Ukrainian community on the Costa Blanca: 10% of Torrevieja

It is half past six on the evening of Saturday 22 August, and the Parque de las Naciones in Torrevieja fills with embroidered shirts, music and the smell of home cooking. Ukraine turns thirty five, and it turns thirty five on the shore of the Mediterranean too. The mayor, Eduardo Dolón, and the councillor for Coexistence and Integration, Óscar Urtasun, open the programme. Around them stand neighbours who arrived twenty years ago and neighbours who arrived four years ago.

The day is organised by the Association of Ukrainians of Torrevieja and the Ukrainian school Ridna Mova, with the town hall, and it spreads from the city centre to the park. That same August, in Alicante city, a hundred metre flag was carried through the streets for the same anniversary.

Torrevieja, the Ukrainian capital of Spain

The municipal register of Torrevieja records almost 11,000 people of Ukrainian nationality. It is the largest foreign nationality in the town, ahead of Colombian, Russian, British and Moroccan, and it accounts for roughly 10% of the city's 110,500 inhabitants. Before 2022 the figure was about a third of what it is now.

The community does not stop at the municipal boundary. It spreads across the whole Vega Baja: Guardamar del Segura, Rojales, Los Montesinos, Orihuela. Around 58,000 Ukrainians live in Alicante province, roughly 17% of the some 326,500 living in Spain as of August 2025, and the Valencian Community and Murcia together hold more than 88,000 residence authorisations. It is by a wide margin the largest concentration in the country.

If you are choosing an area before choosing a home, our portrait of Torrevieja as the foreign capital of the Costa Blanca explains how the neighbourhoods divide up, from the centre to La Mata.

The school that opens on Saturdays

Monday to Friday, the Ukrainian children of Torrevieja attend their assigned Valencian school, in Spanish and Valencian, alongside Spanish, British and Colombian classmates. On Saturdays they attend another one.

Around 400 children and teenagers study at two centres set up for them: the premises of the Association of Ukrainians of Torrevieja, on calle Pedro Lorca, and the public school Salvador Ruso. Twelve Ukrainian teachers, many of them volunteers, cover Ukrainian language, Ukrainian literature and culture, the history of Ukraine, world history, geography and mathematics. Pupils come in from Guardamar, Rojales and Los Montesinos, because on Saturday morning half the Vega Baja moves towards the same place.

The idea behind it is simple and not small: that a child growing up on the Costa Blanca can walk back into a Ukrainian classroom without having lost the thread. If you have just arrived and it is the other side you need, the Spanish one, our guide to enrolling your children in an Alicante school covers deadlines and paperwork.

Spain's first Casa de Ucrania

At calle Urbano Arregui 8 in Torrevieja sits one of the four Reception, Care and Referral Centres that the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration runs in Spain. The other three are in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Málaga and Barcelona. Since 2022 the Torrevieja centre has assisted more than 48,000 displaced people.

It is where the country's first Casa de Ucrania opened in March 2025, with minister Elma Saiz and Ukrainian deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov. It is the place you go to ask about international protection, legal advice, employment guidance, access to the reception system. And, increasingly, about the way back.

Where to pray

In February 2023 the Diocese of Orihuela-Alicante signed an agreement with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and handed it a place of worship of its own: the hermitage of Nuestra Señora de la Salud, in la Vila Joiosa. A last century Catholic hermitage, white bell tower facing the sea, lent to a liturgy that arrived from Kyiv. It is one of those things that only happen where several lives fit at once.

The Russian Orthodox parishes of the coast, including the wooden church of Altea Hills, are mapped in our guide to where Russian speakers live and shop on the Costa Blanca.

The calendar that gets celebrated here

24 August, Independence Day, is the big date, and in Torrevieja it moves to the nearest Saturday so the whole town can come. Many families now celebrate Christmas on 25 December, since the Orthodox Church of Ukraine moved to the revised Julian calendar in 2023, though some households keep 7 January. 24 February, the anniversary of the invasion, is not a celebration: it is a gathering in the square, with candles.

The paperwork, in 2026

This is not legal advice, only the map of where things stand. In July 2025 the Council of the European Union agreed to extend temporary protection for people displaced from Ukraine until 4 March 2027. In Spain, Order INT/96/2026 of 12 February automatically extended the validity of the foreigner identity cards issued under that regime to the same date. While it lasts, temporary protection carries the right to work both as an employee and self employed.

The State Secretariat for Migration also published Instruction SEM 2/2026, which sets out how to move from temporary protection to other residence permits before the exceptional regime ends, without leaving Spain, and how far time spent under temporary protection counts towards the residence requirements for arraigo. For an individual case, the sensible route is an immigration lawyer or an appointment at the Torrevieja CREADE itself.

Buying here, not just being here

Four years is long enough for a rental to turn into a mortgage. A good part of the community has moved from allocated housing to a home of its own, and many families have opened businesses: hairdressers, cafés, florists, twenty four hour supermarkets that serve you in Ukrainian, Russian or Spanish depending on who walks in.

The strip running from central Torrevieja to La Mata is where most of that movement concentrates, partly because it remains one of the more affordable stretches of the Alicante coast. One example of what is there: this penthouse in La Mata, ten minutes from the centre and a walk from the beach.

And if you want to see how another large community in the province organises itself, our portrait of the British community in Alicante follows the same logic: where it lives, where it shops, where it gathers.

Want to see what is available in the area? Explore our properties or get in touch and we will help you find your bearings, without rushing.