Ms Baldwin first visited Spain with her parents as a child, she said, and has gone at least annually thereafter. She refused to elaborate on how many times they have traveled or for how long. “I think it would be crazy to do such a tight timeline for everything. You know, sometimes there was a school involved. Sometimes it was a vacation. It was like this combination, apricot, is that the right word? Like a combination of different things?” “.

She said that when the family visited Spain, they spent most of their time in Madrid, Seville and Valencia.

Baldwin said, when they were at their home in Boston, the family spoke Spanish and cooked Spanish food. Family friends from Spain often live with Hayward-Thomases for extended stays when visiting the United States. “When we were not in Spain, we called her” We brought Spain to our home, “she said.

Lady Baldwin’s older brother, Jeremy, has moved to the Spanish island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean. Mr. Thomas and Dr. Hayward moved there also in 2011.

These experiences explain why the Spanish language, culture, food and traditional dance is so important to its identity, she said, and she and Mr. Baldwin are working to recreate that for their children. “I send them to a bilingual school where they study Spanish in school and I speak Spanish with them at home.” After the pandemic, she and Mr. Baldwin said they plan to spend more time with their children in Mallorca.

“My family, this is where they decided to spend their lives,” she said. “I guarantee to you that they will live there and they will die there. This is their home and this is because this is nothing new, no one put a map on the wall and threw an arrow on it and said, ‘Oh, Spain looks good.”