A 12-month founder residency in rural Galicia. 30 startups per cohort, all in from €400/month — private room, 1 Gbps fibre, acceleration, mentors, investors, demo days and a curated community of builders. First cohort lifts off July 2027.
A 50 m² flat in Madrid or Barcelona costs more than your first engineer. You ship between three coffee shops and a co-working you barely use. You're paying urban prices for a working setup the city doesn't even give you — and your cofounder is two hours away on the metro.
Rural Galicia has space, silence, fibre and a community that wants you. Your runway lasts longer. Your team lives together. Your weekends look different. And the people building with you are the people building beside you.
Rural Valley is the rare place where housing, acceleration and community arrive bundled. Spin one up alone in any other city and your runway is gone. Here, the bundle is the product.
A private room in a renovated 100-bed mountain albergue. Cocina, lounges and 1,000 m² of shared space included. Bills, fibre, cleaning and maintenance handled. Pack a suitcase and ship code.
A 12-month programme designed to move you from idea to traction. Weekly 1:1 mentoring with operators who have founded and sold companies. Quarterly demo days. Direct access to an EU-wide investor network. No tuition, no equity for the residency itself.
29 other founders. A village that wants you to ship. Mentors that show up. A LinkedIn contact you also see at breakfast. Cultural and well-being events that don't feel like a corporate retreat. The community that survives long after the cohort ends.
San Xoán de Río, Ourense. Mountains, rivers, slow mornings, fast fibre. The municipality ceded a 100-bed mountain albergue for the residency — your home for 12 months. Two hours from Vigo and Porto airports. The kind of place that doesn't show up in city rankings, and that's exactly the point.
EU Capitals of Inclusion & Diversity 2026 — Bronze winner Awarded to San Xoán de Río (under-50,000 category) for its sustainable-longevity model — care networks, active elder participation and rural accessibility. The pilot builds on a Commission-recognised foundation.
Rural Valley · Impact Campus · Wye Works · The Strategic School · Entre Nos · with institutional support from the Xunta de Galicia.
30 places in the founding cohort. We read every application and select the projects intentionally — this isn't first-come, first-served. The pre-application takes three minutes.
We read every application carefully. If your project is a fit for the founding cohort, we'll be in touch. Follow us on LinkedIn for build updates in the meantime.
Galicia is the first Rural Valley. By 2035 we're committed to ten or more — across Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and the European countryside that is ready for the next wave of founders. Your cohort is the proof of concept. The alumni network is European by design.
The legitimacy isn't borrowed. Rural Valley plugs directly into three Commission priorities — which is also why the cohort lands with investor and institutional doors open from day one.
Rural Valley delivers the Smart Villages thesis at the village scale: connectivity, services and economic activity built around the host community.
The four objectives of the Rural Pact map directly onto the three layers of the Rural Valley model — residential, programmatic, communal.
Each hub is a measurable instrument for territorial cohesion — beds, jobs, residents, services, intergenerational links — at a scale where outputs are auditable.
If you're a founder, head straight to the application form above. If you're here in another capacity, Rural Valley is built by a consortium — and the consortium is open.
Mentoring slots, investor LP positions, local-supply partnerships, RSC programmes — every Rural Valley wires into the people and the place that host it. Tell us what you bring.
Join the consortiumHost the next Rural Valley. We're mapping candidate municipalities outside Galicia for cohorts opening from 2029. Building stock, demographics, fibre — let us run the diagnostic.
Start a diagnosticCo-fund the Galicia pilot as Tier A, with a Letter of Intent for two-to-three follow-on Member State pilots as Tier B. We share the 19-slide briefing on request.
Request the briefing"The future doesn't have to be built where everyone is already looking. Rural Europe has the land, the silence and the people. We bring the bridge."