CONVERGENCE
By Judith Price
They were scattered across Canada, the United States, Europe and elsewhere, living lives that had little obvious connection.
And then, one by one, they started showing up in El Salvador. Bitcoiners.
Entrepreneurs. Retirees. Homeschooling families. People buying land. Starting businesses. Looking for community.
Some had been thinking about leaving home for years. Others hadn’t been thinking about leaving at all.
Some discovered El Salvador online. Some through Bitcoin. Some through friends. Some came for a conference or a vacation and began looking at the country differently once they were standing in it.
There was no single route in.
If everyone had arrived through the same program, followed the same person or belonged to the same community, there wouldn’t be much of a mystery. One person finds a place, tells another person, and eventually a network forms. But that wasn’t entirely what we were seeing.
These were people making separate decisions, for separate reasons, in separate parts of the world—and somehow arriving at the same destination.
El Salvador.
A country many of them might barely have considered a few years earlier.
Why do people keep finding their way to El Salvador?
There are perfectly reasonable explanations. El Salvador has changed.
The country that spent decades associated internationally with civil war, gangs and violence has undergone a transformation dramatic enough to change how outsiders perceive it. Security improved. Roads and infrastructure expanded. Tourism surged. New hotels, businesses and developments appeared.
International attention followed.
Then there was Bitcoin.
When El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, a country many people had rarely thought about suddenly appeared on the radar of an international community already accustomed to questioning where—and how—they wanted to live.
But Bitcoin doesn’t explain everyone.
Some people come for the climate or the surf. Some see land or business opportunity. Some are retiring. Some have family connections. Some want a slower life, a different life, or simply a change.
And increasingly, there is the most ordinary explanation of all: somebody they know came first.
That’s how migration has always worked. One person goes somewhere new. They tell a friend. A relative visits. Someone sees photographs, hears stories, asks what houses cost. The unfamiliar becomes a little less unfamiliar. The risk becomes a little easier to imagine taking.
Eventually, people begin following people.
There doesn’t have to be anything mysterious about that.
Migration doesn’t require a mystery.
For a while, I was satisfied with that.
Then the stories started sounding strangely familiar.
The people weren’t the same.
They came from different countries, careers, families and lives.
Even their reasons for coming to El Salvador were different.
At least at first.
Because after enough conversations, I began to notice that while the details changed, the stories had a strange tendency to rhyme.
Many of these people hadn’t been searching for El Salvador.
They had been searching for something.
A different way of living. More control over their own lives. A community they hadn’t found somewhere else. An opportunity to create something. A place to start again.
Sometimes the search had been deliberate. Sometimes it had begun with a vague sense that the life they were living no longer fit quite as comfortably as it once had.
And then, somehow, El Salvador entered the picture.
For Kiki, it began with Bitcoin. She discovered Bitcoin in 2020. The following year, a Bitcoin conference brought her to El Salvador for the first time. She returned home to Texas, but the idea apparently came home with her.
She began unwinding the businesses and properties she had spent years building. By 2023, she had relocated to El Salvador and was rebuilding an old farmhouse in Tamanique.
Her route here was distinctly her own. And yet, pieces of it sounded familiar. A new idea appears. El Salvador enters the story.
And somewhere between arriving and leaving, a country that wasn’t part of the original plan becomes difficult to forget.
Not everyone followed that sequence. Not everyone was looking for reinvention.
But I had started listening differently.
The question was no longer simply why people move abroad. People have always done that. It was much more specific.
Why here?
Then something else began happening.
It was no longer simply that people from different places were arriving in the same country.
They were finding one another. Projects overlapped. Interests intersected. Introductions happened at exactly the right moment.
And then I began noticing another repetition. A surprising number of people weren’t simply coming to El Salvador.
They were documenting it.
I was doing it with Build El Salvador. But everywhere I looked, other people seemed to be doing their own version of the same thing.
YouTube channels appeared around life in El Salvador. People filmed themselves walking through towns and neighborhoods, talking into their phones as they went. Instagram accounts documented construction projects, property searches, businesses, Bitcoin, food, beaches and ordinary life here.
Different people. Different audiences. Different reasons for doing it.
Nobody appeared to have assigned us the job. Yet somehow, a growing number of us had decided that whatever was happening here was worth showing to somebody else.
We weren’t simply arriving. We were turning around and pointing back at the place we’d found.
I’ve always believed there is no such thing as coincidence. That’s an easy thing to say when the coincidences are small. It becomes considerably more interesting when they start piling up.
A person appears at precisely the moment you’re researching something they happen to know about.
A subject you’ve barely mentioned starts appearing in conversations with people who couldn’t possibly know you’ve been thinking about it.
Someone you’ve just met turns out to be connected to someone else you’ve just met, through something neither encounter had anything to do with.
I could explain every one of them.
What I was having more difficulty explaining was why I kept having to.
I don’t know what this is, but after enough coincidences, I’ve stopped dismissing the question.
There was, however, a fairly significant complication with my investigation. I wasn’t standing outside this phenomenon documenting it. I was in it.
When my husband and I first arrived, we carried with us much of the same baggage other foreigners do: the headlines, the reputation, the warnings accumulated over decades.
Then we got here.
And almost immediately, the country we experienced began contradicting the country we thought we knew.
We hadn’t come looking for a new country to call home.
Yet somewhere along the way, that changed.
By the end of that first trip, my husband and I were sitting together when I said the words that would eventually alter the direction of our lives:
“We’re retiring here.”
At the time, it felt like a decision. And of course, it was.
But now, after listening to so many other people describe their own unlikely routes to El Salvador, I’ve started looking at ours differently.
What was it about this particular country that drew us in? Why did a place we hadn’t been searching for suddenly feel like somewhere we could imagine a future?
And why did our story now sound strangely similar to some of the stories I had been collecting?
I could no longer ask why they were coming here.
The question had become:
Why did we?
There is another possibility. It’s the one I’ve been reluctant to write down.
Because the moment you do, this stops being a straightforward story about migration, opportunity and communities forming in a changing country.
It asks something much harder to explain. What if we’re not simply finding El Salvador? What if something is drawing us here? What that something might be depends very much on whom you ask.
God?
Providence?
Synchronicity?
Some form of collective consciousness?
Technology connecting people with ideas and communities they might never have encountered a generation ago?
Maybe it’s the network effect: one person arrives, another follows, connections multiply, and people who once would never have known one another begin finding each other.
Maybe we’re living through a particular moment in history that is causing people in very different places to ask similar questions about how—and where—they want to live.
Maybe several of those things are happening at once. That’s what interests me.
And then there’s the name.
El Salvador.
In English:
The Savior.
I’m not suggesting the name proves anything.
But once you begin wondering whether people are being called somewhere, it’s a difficult name to ignore.
Different people. Different countries. Different lives. Different ideas. Different paths.
And somehow, they keep arriving at the same point.
There is a word for separate things moving toward the same place.
Convergence.
It’s the best word I’ve found for what I’ve been watching happen in El Salvador.
But convergence describes what I’m seeing. It doesn’t explain it.
Are people converging on El Salvador? Are ideas converging here too? Are circumstances converging? Or are several things converging at once?
Maybe we’re looking at forces intersecting at an extraordinary moment. Maybe we’re looking at something else.
For now, all I can say with certainty is that the lines keep crossing. And increasingly, they seem to cross here.
Until now, I’ve been looking at the people. Where they came from. What they were leaving behind. How El Salvador first entered their lives. What happened after they arrived.
But perhaps that’s only half of the equation.
If people from different countries, different backgrounds and different lives keep arriving at the same small country, maybe the next question isn’t simply:
Why are these people coming?
Maybe the question is:
What is it about this place?
That changes the investigation. Because humans have been trying to understand their relationship with place for thousands of years. We have measured it. Mapped it. Built according to it.
We have looked to the land beneath us and the sky above us for ways to understand where we are—and, sometimes, why we are there.
Some of those explanations are measurable. Some are ancient. Some are controversial.
And some sit well outside the kinds of things we would normally investigate at Build El Salvador.
That’s okay. We’re going to look. The file is open.
So I’m going to follow the question. Not to prove that El Salvador is calling anyone. Not to decide in advance what the answer should be. Because perhaps I’ve been asking the wrong question all along.
Not:
Why do people keep finding their way to El Salvador?
But:
What are they finding?
FIELD NOTES
Are people being summoned to El Salvador?
After asking people whether unusual coincidences had played a role in bringing them to El Salvador, the responses revealed an interesting distinction.
Some described a feeling of being called.
Others described synchronicities that began only after they arrived.
Mya was relieved to discover that someone else was asking these questions. She said she had not one, but many stories, some of them almost too “woo-woo” to share.
Jennifer, who has interviewed people about their experiences in El Salvador, said she had spoken with many who described feeling “called” here. She also noticed that they often ended up doing something completely different from what they had done in their previous country.
Karen’s experience was different.
For her, the strange coincidences began after arriving in El Salvador. She described repeated synchronicities involving the people she met.
But not everyone attributed the movement to something mysterious.
BrightElk suggested that many people were simply escaping circumstances in their home countries, describing Europe as “lost” and the United States as “tiresome.”
Mauricio, who has spent seven years helping buyers in El Salvador, offered a more practical observation. He said those who end up staying usually rent first, experiencing both city life and the coast before deciding where to buy.
His advice was to discover which place feels like home.
Martha-Julia simply found the question interesting.
Taken together, the responses revealed another distinction.
There are people who describe unusual circumstances that brought them to El Salvador.
There are people who describe unexpected connections after arriving.
And there are people who see the decision as a practical response to the circumstances they left behind.
These experiences don’t necessarily point to the same explanation.
But they raise another question.
If some people feel called to El Salvador, and others begin experiencing unusual connections only after arriving, is the convergence happening before they get here—or afterward?
Perhaps both.
THE CONNECTION explores an intriguing question: Why are people from different parts of the world finding their way to El Salvador? Through personal stories, unexpected coincidences, history, science and ancient ideas, this investigative series examines whether something more than opportunity is bringing them together.