Most "teach English in Spain" sites are written by marketers who've never set foot in a Spanish classroom. We're the opposite. We train English teachers, and our sister school employs them, so we see this whole journey from both sides, every single term. That's why we can tell you how it really works.
Who we are
TEFL Iberia is a Trinity CertTESOL teacher-training school, based in Barcelona and Seville. We've been training people to teach English since 2012, in small groups, with real teaching practice and proper job support.
Iberia Language Academy is our sister school: a language academy in Barcelona that employs teachers and teaches students day in, day out. That matters for this guide, because it means we don't just train teachers and wave them off. We hire them, we know what schools actually look for, and we live the visa paperwork, the contracts and the September hiring scramble alongside them.
Why that makes this guide worth reading
Between the two schools, our team has decades of combined experience in the Spanish classroom. We've helped over a thousand people from 60-plus countries qualify and find work here. We sit on both sides of the desk: we know what makes a good teacher because we train them, and we know what a good job looks like because we offer them. When this guide tells you what a school wants, what a visa really requires or what you'll honestly earn, it's coming from people who do this for a living, not from a blog post written somewhere else.
Our promise
Here's the part that matters. We have a school to fill, so the easy thing would be to push everyone towards our own course. We don't. We've built this guide to be genuinely useful first, and that means:
- We give you the straight answer, even when it doesn't send business our way.
- We cover routes that aren't ours, the government assistant programmes, working holiday visas, other cities, even online courses.
- We say plainly that the CELTA and the Trinity CertTESOL are equivalent, even though we run the Trinity one.
- We flag the bad news too: that pay is modest, that you won't get rich, that Andalusia's assistant programme is currently suspended.
- We mark estimates as estimates, and we base the facts on primary sources.
How we keep it accurate
Spanish rules change, so we work from primary sources, government and Instituto Cervantes pages, official programme sites, and we date our figures so you know how current they are. When the law shifts, like the big 2025 visa reform, we update the guides, and the visa specifics are checked by the team who handle this paperwork in real life. Where something can't be verified, we say so rather than guess.
Meet the team
Richard Davie
Richard founded TEFL Iberia in 2012. He moved to Barcelona after graduating from Edinburgh, taught English across the city, and built the school he wished he'd trained at: small groups, real support and a globally recognised qualification. He later launched Iberia Language Academy, the sister school.
Raquel Rojo
Raquel is an art historian and linguist who has taught, written and directed studies across Spain, Greece, Mexico, Israel and China. As co-founder and Academic Director of Iberia Language Academy, she leads on teaching quality and on helping students settle into Spanish life. She's fluent in Catalan and English.
Full transparency
This site is published by TEFL Iberia, which runs a Trinity CertTESOL course, and Iberia Language Academy, a language academy that employs teachers. So yes, we have an interest in you training and teaching in Spain. We've built this guide to be useful first: we cover the routes and providers that aren't ours, we mark our own course clearly as ours, and we'll always give you the honest answer over the convenient one.
Get in touch
We're based in Barcelona and Seville, and we're happy to help whether or not you ever train with us. You can reach the teacher-training side at TEFL Iberia and the language academy at Iberia Language Academy. Or start with the free check and we'll point you the right way.
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