Nearly Three Decades Welcoming International Students

When Shoreless Lake School opened its doors in Totana in 1997, it did so as the Spanish branch of an educational project that had begun six years earlier in New Jersey, under the leadership of Reverend Alfonso Gálvez Morillas. The idea was simple and demanding at the same time: to offer young people from different countries a Catholic education, academically rigorous, in a boarding-school setting, with a U.S. curriculum. That international calling has shaped the life of the school ever since.

It has not been a formal program in the bureaucratic sense — it has been a daily reality. Families from several continents have trusted SLS with the education of their children for a year, two, sometimes all the way to graduation. Some came by recommendation of other families. Others arrived through the living connection with Shoreless Lake School of Wisconsin, the sister campus in the United States, with which the school has maintained a natural flow of students for years — young people spending time on either side of the Atlantic as each family's circumstances required.

That comings-and-goings has left a concrete mark on the house. Students who arrived without speaking Spanish and left holding their own in Latin. Siblings who overlapped at the boarding school for several years in a row. Former students today at universities in the United States, Spain, and other European countries. And the daily contact with the boys from Wisconsin, who every now and then show up at La Isla or at the weekend house in Mazarrón and simply blend into the school routine.

What changes now is not the substance, but the form. The new Spanish Immigration Regulation, in force since 2025, provides a specific framework for international secondary-school students to complete a full academic year at an officially recognized Spanish school. SLS has chosen to formalize its International Student Mobility Program under that framework. The school continues doing what it has always done — welcoming, educating, accompanying — now within the legal form that matches the practice, with agreements between schools, clear documentation and a defined procedure for families.

The first agreements under the new program are underway with schools in Ecuador, Colombia and the United States. Each with its own story, its own families, its own students with names and faces. The program now has a structure, but what it offers is, at heart, what it has always offered: a school year at a Catholic boarding school in a town in southeastern Spain, where English and Spanish have been taught for twenty-nine years, and where students are, above all, students — wherever they come from.