What is a Digital Nomad?

A digital nomad is someone who earns their living online and chooses to work from different places around the world instead of being tied to one office or city. Could be a software engineer in Oaxaca, a marketing consultant writing emails from a Lisbon café, or a designer with a laptop bag that's better organized than most people's apartments.

The "digital" part is the job: remote work, freelance contracts, client work, or running an online business. The "nomad" part is the lifestyle choice: no fixed base, constant movement, or at least the freedom to be somewhere else.

What gets lost in most definitions is that digital nomads aren't just travelling workers. Most of them left something behind: a lease, a commute, a five-day-a-week office routine. They figured out that where you sit to send emails doesn't have to be the same place forever. That's not a personality trait. It's just a decision, and millions of people have made it.

The tricky part nobody puts in the Wikipedia article? It gets lonely. Fast.

Why the "Digital Nomad" Life Actually Needs Other People

Nobody tells you this when you're packing your first carry-on: working alone in a new city is fantastic for about three weeks. Then you start having full conversations with your Airbnb host just because they're the only human you've seen all day.

Digital nomads need community for the same reason everyone else does, except the stakes are higher when you move every few months and have to rebuild your entire social life from scratch each time. The friends you make in one city are a nine-hour flight away by the time you've started to feel at home.

That's why coliving became such a natural fit for remote workers. The WiFi is usually better too, but that's not why. You wake up to people who get it. Who also skipped the 9-to-5. Who also have opinions about which neighbourhood has the best local market. Shared context is rare. When you find it, you don't let it go easily.

At Casa Basilico

Our Madeira chapter had a guy who'd been nomading solo for two years before he joined us. By week two he was running an informal evening cook session where six of us learned to make bacalhau the way his Portuguese neighbour had shown him. He'd never cooked for a group in his life. On the last day, he said it was the first time in two years he hadn't felt like a tourist somewhere.

That's what we're trying to build. Not a co-working space with beds. An actual experience that makes a city feel like somewhere you lived, not somewhere you passed through.

Come for the tacos (or the bacalhau). Stay for the people. That's the whole pitch.

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Ready to try it in real life? Check out the Oaxaca 2026 chapter. It's coming together fast and spots go quickly.