As I recommend in my upon arriving to Barcelona post, the very first thing to do is get a Spanish phone number! The easiest and fastest way is to buy a cheap, pre-paid phone when you get there.

Contracts are totally different than in the US, all phones are unlocked and they are not contracted to be sold only with certain phone service companies. It is a better and cheaper system.

If you wanted to run you US phone number and your Spanish phone number in the same phone, you can do that too! I had one for a few years – it was very handy to not have to cart and charge two separate phones. Here are just a couple examples of unlocked dual SIM phones:

I’ll stop with the phone promos, there are tons on Amazon I have just discovered. You can also find some on eBay, but a lot of those are pretty low quality phones and imitations. I am speaking from experience here…. I bought one on eBay a couple years ago which worked great, but it was a no-name Chinese model, and thinking about it now reminds me to recommend staying away from the no-name Chinese phones. Not only are they are impossible to navigate, they come with strange videos, weird and useless features like UHF Television functions and of course, awful ringtones.