Sardines, Strangers and the Surprising Math of Who Builds Businesses in Galicia
A morning at Vertical Summit 2026 in Vigo: canned-fish history, real conversations, and why networking means stepping out of your own bubble.
Nobody wakes up on a Friday morning thinking, today I am going to learn a great deal about canned fish. I certainly didn’t. And yet there I was last month, on September 25th, in the Palacio de la Oliva in Vigo, at the fourth edition of Vertical Summit, listening to people trace the history of Galicia’s canning industry, and finding myself oddly absorbed. Sardines and tuna, it turns out, are a much bigger part of this region’s story than my tinned-fish-as-pantry-backup relationship had prepared me for. 😄
That is the thing about events like this one. You walk in with a vague plan to network, and the day has other ideas. The palace itself helped. It is a beautiful setting, and the whole morning had the feel of a class reunion, in the best sense: familiar faces from around Vigo’s business world, a few new ones, and enough time between talks for conversations that went somewhere. More than 200 people were there, from around 150 companies, and the terrace stayed open all day as a place to simply stand around and talk. That sounds small. It is not. Most business events hand you a badge and a schedule and hope connection happens by accident. This one made room for it on purpose.
The format helped too. The talks on the main stage were short and direct, which meant nobody had time to drift off, and a separate backstage room hosted interviews in a more intimate setting. I have sat through enough hour-long panels to know the difference. A short talk forces the speaker to decide what actually matters.
One of those talks is the reason I am writing this. It was about immigration and entrepreneurship, and its central point has stayed with me ever since: in Galicia, the number of foreign self-employed people keeps growing, and that growth is what keeps the overall number of self-employed people from shrinking.
Read that again slowly, because it flips the usual framing. Much of the public conversation about immigration treats newcomers as a question to be managed, a pressure on services, a debate about numbers. Far less often does it ask who is quietly holding up the local economy. People do not only come to Galicia to take jobs. Many of them become self-employed. They register, they invoice, they open shops and studios and consultancies, they hire neighbors, and they pay into the system that everyone else relies on. In a region that is aging and where fewer people start businesses than before, that matters enormously.
I listened to this as someone who is, myself, a foreigner and self-employed in Galicia, and I will admit it landed personally. Anyone who has gone through the paperwork of setting up on their own in a second language, in a country that is not the one they grew up in, knows it is not a casual decision. It is a bet on a place. Hearing it described as a contribution rather than a problem was a small, quiet relief.
There were smaller pleasures, of course. The goodie bag, for one. I expected the usual lanyard-and-pen situation, the flyers I would recycle on the walk home. Instead it was full of IKEA: candles, nuts, little things I actually wanted. Not what I would have predicted at a Galician business forum, and I am not complaining. I lit the candle that evening. 🕯️
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What I keep coming back to, though, is how much of the day happened outside my usual orbit. I work in partnerships, so I spend plenty of time among people who already think the way I do, who care about integration and belonging and building a life in Galicia. That is a wonderful bubble, and also still a bubble. At Vertical Summit I ended up among industrialists, marketers, family firms, a teenager who has been running his own company since he was eight, and, apparently, the entire economic history of the sardine. None of it was on my agenda. All of it was useful.
So my takeaway is simple, and a little embarrassing in how obvious it is. Networking is not collecting contacts. It is stepping out of your own bubble far enough that something unexpected reaches you. This time I got much further out than I planned, and I came home with a better understanding of the place I live, a candle, and a newfound respect for tinned fish. That is exactly how it should be. 😉
Bibliography
AEMOS. (n.d.). Vertical Summit 2026. https://www.aemos.es/vertical-summit-2026
El Español. (2026, 21 September). Vigo se prepara para uno de los eventos del año: así será Vertical Summit 2026. Treintayseis. https://www.elespanol.com/treintayseis/economia/empresas/20260921/vigo-prepara-eventos-ano-vertical-summit/1003744390515_0.html
Metropolitano. (n.d.). El Palacio de la Oliva como inspiración, el congreso que reúne a un emprendedor de 15 años a altos directivos. https://metropolitano.gal/que-hacer/el-palacio-de-la-oliva-como-inspiracion-el-congreso-que-reune-a-un-emprendedor-de-15-anos-a-altos-directivos/
VigoÉ. (2026, 24 September). Vertical Summit reúne en Vigo a más de 200 profesionales para impulsar el networking y poner en valor el talento empresarial. https://www.vigoe.es/vigo/economia/vertical-summit-reune-en-vigo-a-mas-de-200-profesionales-para-impulsar-el-networking-y-poner-en-valor-el-talento-empresarial/
VigoÉ. (2026, 26 September). Vertical Summit se consagra en su cuarta edición como el punto de encuentro del tejido empresarial gallego. https://www.vigoe.es/vigo/economia/vertical-summit-se-consagra-en-su-cuarta-edicion-como-el-punto-de-encuentro-del-tejido-empresarial-gallego/
About the Author: Dorothée Müller is the founder of Bauherz Digital, advising ConTech startups on market entry into the DACH region and Spain. With nearly 20 years in the digital transformation of the construction sector, she has built new markets for technology companies across Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Spain — specialising in stakeholder positioning, strategic partnerships, and helping organisations adopt digital and SaaS solutions in traditionally analogue industries. A member of the LiveGalicia community since 2021, Dorothée began as a moderator of its main Facebook group before taking on a more active role in events and the community. In the fall of 2025, her role evolved into collaborating as Head of Partnerships, supporting business development and the growth of LiveGalicia’s referral partnership network.
