After receiving a recommendation for Repeople coliving space in Las Palmas, I’d been trying to get in for a year as it often is sold out during the high season of the Northern Hemisphere winter. This is because many people from the colder parts of Europe are escaping the winter for sunnier climes, and the Canary Islands are very accessible to get to. I had to book my stay 3 months in advance and stayed from January to March 2024 with my husband.
I would say that my experience there was quite mixed. There were a lot of good things about living there, but it also fell short of my expectations in some other aspects.
Repeople is a coliving community with multiple different houses dispersed in the same neighbourhood. Because of this, the community feel was not quite as it would be if it were just one or two houses next to each other. There is at least a WhatsApp group for all the current people staying in Repeople, so that’s a way you can keep in touch and make plans with everyone. However, it’s not quite the same as being able to just bump into people around the same building.
My husband and I stayed in a double ensuite room at the Repeople house called Mansion. Our room was at the top of the building, right by the rooftop entrance. It was quite a small room – don’t expect to be able to exercise in here, haha. This was also my fault for not checking the dimensions and virtual tour on their website, oops! Otherwise, it was cosy and comfy, and we had a good decent-sized ensuite bathroom.
The accommodation itself was rather good quality and fit for the purpose of housing digital nomads. The bedrooms all have desks and even an additional monitor, which was a nice extra that I wasn’t expecting, but it came in very useful! The monitor was slightly bigger than my laptop, so it was great to use as a second screen while working, as well as watch TV shows on it.
There are lots of good spots around the house that you can work at. There’s the spacious coworking space in the huge living room, as well as a high table that doubles as a great standing table, if you need to not be sitting down full time. There’s also a nice table in the front garden with shade over that I often really enjoyed working at.
Wifi in the house was mostly fine, though could be spotty at times. Whenever we reported this, it seemed to get resolved rather quickly, and it was never bad enough that we couldn’t work in the house, so overall it was fine.
Included in the cost of staying at Repeople, we had access to their coworking space in the city. It’s a half-hour walk away, or you can get there by bus. I enjoyed the easy walk there and seeing the hustle and bustle of the city. The coworking space was nice – nothing spectacular, but nothing bad about it either. It serves its purpose as a professional space to use outside of the home, and it’s preferable to a café. I used this coworking space a few times and it was never particularly busy, often with just a handful of other people in there. So don’t expect community in here, but do expect to have a quiet productive space to get your work done.
Customer service at Repeople was so-so. I would report issues and they were usually dealt with, especially if it was something rather high priority or urgent. However, I remember asking for an oven glove several times and it just never materialised. Unlike other coliving spaces I’ve been in, you don’t really see the staff members here very often – you only hear of them from WhatsApp. Again, since this is a coliving community that is dispersed across multiple houses around a neighbourhood, that probably makes it not very practical for staff to physically be around much. This is OK, but probably not my preference for a coliving space.
There weren’t a lot of events being organised by the staff. Once a fortnight there was a regular networking event at the lovely new local coworking space, Work in Cholas. I went to this a few times and enjoyed it – it was a chance to meet colivers in other houses, have some free beer and pizza, and colivers also had the opportunity to show a presentation of a project that they are working on.
Otherwise, there’s no real schedule – I’m not sure if there used to be, since I did get recommended this place and I saw a blackboard in our coliving house. Whether any coliving community events happen is heavily dependent on the residents to self-manage the community and organise. It could be hit and miss, but I did enjoy a few things, like drinks with a few of the fellow colivers before the annual carnival, and some dinners and nights out. On my last weekend in Gran Canaria, I went with a couple of German friends from Repeople to Maspalomas, a very touristy town in the south of the island, and it was a good enjoyable experience. Gran Canaria is such a small island that you can easily travel to the other side of it by car or bus, so you can probably enjoy it and easily explore lots of it wherever you stay in the island.
I found Repeople to be quite an expensive coliving space and I expected more for what we got. In hindsight, staying in any coliving space in Las Palmas actually turns out to be unnecessary anyway. I ended up meeting a lot more people at Livin It Up Las Palmas, a digital nomad community in the city that was luckily recommended to me by one of our housemates in our first week in Repeople when I was asking about events. It’s a website and Slack group that you can join, where you can chat with lots of other nomads in the city, get tips and advice about what’s in the area, and find plenty of events to go to. I met Nelleke, who founded and runs the community, at multiple events and she’s very friendly, helpful and approachable – she’s also brilliant for creating such an amazing community!
On Tuesdays, Livin It Up Las Palmas would host a popular meetup in a local bar, which was often good fun and great for meeting other nomads. Through it, I also went to a fun boat party in the south, and an art and dance festival in Agaete, a rural town in the west of the island. It’s also where I found out about another coliving space, EcoIsleta, which arranges events not just for its members but also open to the public – here, I attended some fun events like board game nights and dinners.
I liked the city of Las Palmas, and Gran Canaria as a whole, and I’d totally go again. The weather was lovely, and the constant sunshine was such a great vibe. It’s also funnily enough where I discovered Senegalese food – after failing to find Nigerian food on a Google search, I found a local Senegalese restaurant, Le Walo, that I often frequented to try many tasty dishes.
Livin It Up Las Palmas provides such a thriving digital nomad community that you really don’t need to stay in a coliving space in Las Palmas. I would totally love to return, but I would rather opt to stay in a cheaper apartment accommodation if possible. Repeople wasn’t by far my worst coliving experience, and I’d still recommend it as a decent digital nomad accommodation to stay in Las Palmas if you’re not penny-pinching or needing to have community in your home. The way the community management is in Repeople probably suits some people fine, but for me, I prefer a more guest-centred experience and co-created events from the likes of coliving spaces such as Sun and Co and Chateau Coliving. So, there’s my mixed review for you – a total yes to remote working in Las Palmas, and an OK rating for Repeople from me!
