You've seen them in Bali, in Thailand, in Lisbon: young professionals clacking on their MacBook Airs at the English-speaking coffee shop, in between sips of cortado; surfers emerging from the waves to take Zoom calls and send Slack updates. Digital nomads have fully saturated the world's cosmopolitan hubs, inflating housing costs and homogenizing local culture. But what if these longstay tourists spread further—to smaller, rural places? Places that are even more vulnerable to gentrification? As Susana Ferreira reports in a new feature story, this is precisely what's happening in a tiny seaside parish—population 4,300—on the Portuguese island territory of Madeira. In the midst of the pandemic, an ambitious entrepreneur sold the regional government on building a village for digital nomads. He promised a revival of the local tourism industry along with a genuine community of foreign remote workers and Madeiran residents. For many, the plan hasn't panned out. But that won't stop the expansion of the village model to more far-flung locales—just as long as the Wi-Fi is fast, the beaches surfable, and the sunsets Instagrammable. —Camille Bromley | Features Editor |
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