Andorra

An expatriate’s impressions

Image credit: the author

Andorra is one of the world’s smallest countries, nestled in the Pyrenees between France and Spain. There is one road in from France, and one road in from Spain, and that’s it — no airport, no other means of access or egress. Fewer than 80,000 people live in Andorra, and most of those live in the capital Andorra de la Vella. The nation’s primary source of income is tourism, with people flocking to the place in the summer to hike and bike, and then flocking once more in winter to ski and, sigh, snowboard.

Andorra is a very beautiful country, with mountains everywhere you look. It’s like someone took Switzerland and compressed it so that it would fit in a fraction of the space. From a touristic perspective, it’s very appealing: so much to see, and all crammed into a country you can cross in less than two hours by car.

The view from the author’s window

There is more to Andorra, of course, than spectacular views.

It turns out that those mountains are, for full-time residents of the country, more of a curse than a boon. Andorra has one of the highest rates of mental health issues in the OECD, with anxiety top of the list. People, apparently, feel the mountains closing in on them. They feel claustrophobic. So while tourists enjoy the magnificent vistas, residents feel panicky.

For arrivals perfectly content with mountains all around, Andorra presents other challenges. While some parts of the country are quite 21st century, with QR-code reading car park machines and good Internet bandwidth, the official bureaucracy is best described as Dickensian. Whereas it usually takes less than sixty minutes to open a personal checking account in most modern countries, it can take weeks in Andorra. A foreigner attempting to open a basic bank account must provide a wide range of utterly irrelevant documentation including prior year tax returns, various proofs of income, copies of utility bills from former places of residence, passport, at least one year’s worth of bank records from one’s foreign bank accounts, and notarized affidavits from at least six people your maternal grandmother knew on the occasion of your birth, testifying that you were a…