Barcelona

I am now moving my base to Barcelona for personal reasons. From August 2026, this is where you will find me most of the time.

From a personal perspective, Barcelona is still a kind city: a place with space and time for children and older people, and with public systems that work. Tradition and modernity coexist naturally. You can bring a chair into the street and have a drink with your neighbours as though it were your living room, while high-technology companies and skilled employment grow nearby. Some are recent arrivals backed by major multinational investment; others were built locally decades ago. Together, they form something more substantial than an innovation scene: a genuine industrial fabric.

Professionally, what attracts me is Barcelona’s remarkable health and life-sciences ecosystem. In ambition and emotion, the city feels like a counterpoint to the broader European mood: vibrant, future-oriented and sustained by a Catalan belief that something larger is being built here. Several factors come together in unusual concentration: excellent hospitals; a strong tradition of clinical research that attracts numerous clinical trials; major pharmaceutical companies; outstanding research institutions; a mature investment community for life sciences and innovation more broadly; and a thriving innovation ecosystem.

One aspect of Barcelona feels familiar from my work in the Gulf: the willingness to articulate ambition and give it a practical direction. The scale and political context are different, but Barcelona Impulsa 2025–2035 performs a related function, setting out how the city intends to turn its strengths in science, technology, industry and talent into broadly shared prosperity.