What 2,400 Expats Actually Do to Make Friends in Barcelona

We wanted to know what actually happens once someone new joins Keep Calm, so we pulled the numbers from our own WhatsApp community, anonymised, in aggregate, no names or messages attached. Here is what over 2,400 members in Barcelona have shown us about how people really make friends in a new city.

The starting point is always the same

Almost everyone who joins Keep Calm arrives the same way: alone, a little unsure, and not knowing a single person in the group. That is the whole premise of the community, so it is not a surprise. What is more interesting is what happens next.

People do not join one thing, they join several

The biggest pattern in the data is how quickly a single join turns into several. On average, each member ends up in just over five of our activity groups, whether that is padel, volleyball, hiking, yoga, or one of the many other things we run. 95% of members are active in two or more groups, and nearly three in four (73%) are in three or more.

That matters because it is the opposite of how most people expect to make friends abroad. The instinct is to find "the one thing" (the running club, the language exchange, the padel group) and hope it works out. In practice, the people who end up most embedded in the community are the ones who said yes to a second and third activity before the first one had even properly clicked.

The busiest rooms in the community

Some groups have grown far bigger than others. Keep Calm Social, our general meet-up and pub-quiz-style group, is the single largest activity group at over 960 members. Volleyball and padel are close behind, each with close to 950 members (padel is actually split across nine separate skill-tiered and day-specific groups, from total beginners to advanced, so a huge number of people are playing regularly without ever mixing with a level that is not their own). Hiking rounds out the top four with over 770 members, which for a sport that requires an entire Saturday says a lot about how much people want a reason to get out of the city together.

The conversations add up

Since we started in October 2025, members have sent over 75,000 messages across our group chats. That is not a stat we expected to be interesting until we sat with it: it is 75,000 individual moments of someone asking if anyone fancies a game this weekend, sharing a photo from Sunday's hike, or just replying with a laughing emoji to keep a conversation alive. Community does not happen in the big gestures, it happens in that volume of small ones.

What this means if you have just moved here

If there is one honest takeaway from looking at our own numbers, it is this: do not wait until you feel settled before saying yes to things. The members who are most connected a few months in are not the ones who found the perfect single group, they are the ones who showed up to more than one thing early, even when it felt like a lot.

You do not need to know anyone before you join. Almost everyone who is now deep in the community started exactly where you are.

At Keep Calm we are a free, volunteer-run, English-speaking community for expats, internationals and newcomers in Barcelona. All figures in this post are aggregated and anonymised community statistics; you can read more about how we handle data at our policies page. Everything we run is 18+ and open to all levels.

If you want to be part of the next set of numbers, the simplest first step is to join the community and see which group catches your eye first. Chances are it will not be the only one for long.