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Digital nomad meetups by city, checked in September 2026

Four of these seven cities have a nomad meetup that runs every single week: Lisbon, Bangkok, Barcelona and Buenos Aires, in that order of size. Chiang Mai has something on most weeknights, though the group named simply Chiang Mai Digital Nomads last posted an event on 28 May, and the one still running buries those two words at the end of a longer name. In Da Nang there is a room open almost every evening, and none of it is nomad-branded. Then Bali. Dojo Bali, still recommended in older nomad listicles, shut in December 2022, and what remains on Meetup pulls one to four RSVPs per event.

How this was checked

I opened every page below on 6 September 2026 and wrote down what it actually said. Member counts, RSVP counts, the weekday, the venue, the price where one was published. Nothing here was copied from another list.

Every entry gives you the recurring slot rather than a date. A meetup that has run on Thursdays since 2017 will probably still be on Thursdays when you read this. Put a specific date on it and the whole thing goes stale in a fortnight.

One gap you should know about. Facebook blocks automated fetching, so I could not verify a single Facebook group, WhatsApp invite or Instagram account for any of these cities. Plenty of them exist and some are probably better than what follows. I will not call one active when all I can see of it is a login wall.

Lisbon

Lisbon Digital Nomads is the biggest group on this page. 25,706 members, a weekly Thursday meetup that has run since 2017, an organiser called Ash with three others behind him. The Thursday slot had a rooftop edition at Catch Me with 37 people attending, and the same calendar carries a Tuesday English comedy evening, so the group is doing more than sitting around with laptops.

Underneath it are groups with single-digit membership. Lisbon Remote Workers Coffee and Chat has nine members and meets on Fridays at 6 PM in the Vasco da Gama shopping centre. Nine. That is what the bottom of the list looks like before a blog calls it a hidden gem, and it is also the only size of group where you end up talking to everybody in the room.

Second Home Lisboa sells a day pass from 25 euros plus VAT as of September 2026 and advertises a cultural programme it describes as "Events designed to inspire and ignite ideas". It publishes no dated events at all. Treat that as a promise rather than a calendar you can plan a Wednesday around.

Bangkok

Bangkok Digital Nomads calls itself the city's most active weekly community and has 15,038 members standing behind the claim. It meets Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. The anchor is Thursday at 6:30 PM in the Gardens of Dinsor Palace in Ekkamai, 30 attending when I looked, with board games on Friday at 7:30 PM and a Slow Sunday book and coffee session closing out the week.

Bangkok Expat, Digital Nomads and Thai People Meetup had 45 people down for a free Friday nomad social, against 30 for the branded Thursday, plus a Wednesday games night on 25 and a Saturday meet and mingle at 7 PM. Between them the two groups cover six nights of the week.

The Hive runs Thonglor and Prakanong, quotes hot desks from THB 4,000 per person per month as of September 2026, and tells members they can attend any of its social, learning and networking events. The site never says which events those are, or on which nights.

Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai Digital Nomads has 240 members, a 4.8 rating from 11 reviews and a calendar of nothing but past events. The most recent was an entrepreneurs and nomads mixer at Alt_PingRiver on 28 May. Dormant. It is also the name you would type into the search box, which is how people end up with a free Wednesday evening and nowhere to be.

The group that is running carries the same two words, buried at the end of a longer one. Chiang Mai Professionals, Expats, and Digital Nomads has 3,295 members and sixteen organisers, which is how it fills a week: Dune Days on Tuesdays, a writing and poetry club and an intro gamers night both on Wednesdays, Strategy Thursdays, a Friday dinner for long-termers and DTV visa holders that had 23 attending, and a Sunday brunch.

Two recurring things sit on Eventbrite instead: an AI meetup for women at the 4Seas Nimman coliving space, with 16 more dates listed behind it, and a casual solo travellers hangout at the Three Kings Monument at 4 PM, with 15 more occurrences. Punspace has been open at both branches since 2013, Wiang Kaew daily from 9 to 6 and Tha Phae Gate Monday to Saturday, 24/7 for members, with no published prices and no events calendar.

Barcelona

Barcelona Digital Nomads has 14,898 members, over 500 past events and 1,506 reviews averaging 4.5 stars, the deepest review record of any Meetup group on this page. The Monday fixture is a 6 km nomad run at 7:30 PM with 41 people attending. Wednesdays are the networking meetup, alternating with a bar quiz. Every other Sunday there is a new-in-town brunch, 25 down when I checked.

The single biggest RSVP count I saw in any of the seven cities was here: 65 people for an AI circle with talks, a skill share and rooftop drinks afterwards on a Tuesday.

Barcelona also has a paid layer that keeps running. On Eventbrite, Barcelona Reinvents runs a networking night for nomads, startups and investors every Thursday at 7 PM in Cervecería Ogham. The listing already carries more than 70 dates.

Buenos Aires

BA Digital Nomads has 8,988 members and one recurring event: an after office at Behind Bar, Costa Rica 4933 in CABA, Fridays from 9 PM to 1 AM, happy hour until ten, a DJ, and the group calls it the nomads' cave. Three people had RSVPed.

From the same search results, a group called Culture Shock Therapy runs a Write Club every Monday at 4:30 PM with 14 attending, and a Sunday deep-talks-and-coffee at 6 PM with 12. The writing club out-draws the bar with the DJ, fourteen to three. If Friday looks dead on the week you are there, the Buenos Aires search page also lists a coworking cafe meetup in Caballito, a Thursday social coworking session run by Global Minds Hub, and the local Nomads Giving Back chapter.

Da Nang

Nothing in Da Nang carries a nomad label, and the city still fills six nights of the week. The centre of it is The Workshop, rated 4.8, running a different event most nights: a show-and-tell cinema club on Mondays, improv on Tuesdays, board games Wednesdays, a quiz on Thursdays that costs two dollars, karaoke Fridays, a Vietnamese language club on Saturdays.

Lounge Asia draws more people than any other recurring social I found there, a biweekly Wednesday meetup at 7 PM described as easy English, 14 attending, rated 4.7. After that it thins out fast. An AI and deep learning meetup on Sundays at 11 AM had four people. A practical philosophy club on Saturdays had three. There is a book club. None of it comes back if you search for the word nomad.

Bali and Canggu

Dojo Bali is closed. Its own front page still says so, typo included: "Dojo Bali offically closed Dec '22 - Cheers to 7 years of memories!" Nearly four years shut, and it is still recommended in nomad listicles that were written once and never re-opened.

What is left on Meetup around Denpasar and Canggu is thin. Nomads Giving Back has a Bali community rated 4.7 running a monthly Nomads Connections plus a Saturday Balinese culture session, BaliSquad does a Thursday board games social, and there is a well-rated group for social media creators and influencers. Every RSVP count I saw across all of them was between one and four.

The activity moved to paid dinners. On Eventbrite, Dinner with Digital Nomads has seven more dates queued, a Foodies and New Friends series lists 115 more occurrences, and a 100 Cities Project dinner runs alongside them, all at a venue listed as Restaurant of the Week.

What about Nomads.com

Its meetups page told me there are 10 digital nomad meetups you can attend this month, and that the site has brought 58,809 people together over the years. Then it showed one confirmed event, a cowork plus after drinks in London on 10 September, and three proposed ones in Asunción. All members-only. I looked on the 6th, so most of the month was still ahead of it.

The members map and the per-city chat sit behind that same members-only wall, and the Lisbon page carries a nomad score of 3.97 out of 5 from 3,694 reviews. As a calendar, on the day I checked, it was one London coffee.

Which of your own friends will be there

The same thread comes back to r/digitalnomad every few months. December 2024: "curious how you all stay connected with friends, or find out who's in your city besides Instagram or current social media… Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already." Five years earlier, on the same subreddit, someone had already resorted to pins: "I started to use Google MyMaps to pin the friends I have in each city but it's not really convenient and I wonder if there's a better way to keep track of where do live the friends you make when you travel." The groups on this page do the opposite job, filling a room with people you have not met yet.

"All the friends I've made on vacations happen by complete accident." That is the top answer on an r/travel thread from 20 November 2025, 97 upvotes, and it is fair, because accidents do most of the work. The friend who was in Canggu the week before you does not turn up by accident, and usually you find out from her Instagram after she has flown home.

Where Will U Be There fits into this

I built Will U Be There for the Canggu case. You add a trip, meaning a city and two dates. Your friends add theirs. When two trips land within 100 km of each other and the dates touch, you both get a notification carrying that city and those dates, and nothing else from either itinerary. If a friend lives in the city you are flying to and will be home that week rather than off on a trip of their own, that counts too. Miss someone by up to about a week and it flags the near miss, which is how you find out that shifting your Bangkok leg by two days lands you both in the same Thursday meetup in Ekkamai.

A city name and two dates is the entire input. The app asks for no location permission and never receives your position, so it cannot put a live dot on a map for anyone, me included. Friends who will not install another app can join through a group link that holds up to 200 people and needs no friend requests inside it. Free on iPhone and Android, with no ads and no in-app purchases. The privacy page lists every field the database actually holds.

Strangers are outside what it does. There is no directory of nomads in Lisbon inside it and I am not going to build one, because for that job the Meetup groups above beat anything I could ship. Where it overlaps with this page is events: for each trip it lists concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of your accommodation and inside your dates, drawn from over 200,000 upcoming events in 57 countries and more than 360 named sources. Coverage is uneven, and some cities are far denser than others. There is a longer piece on the apps expats and nomads use to stay close to their friends if you want the full comparison, and the app is on the App Store and Google Play.

I will re-check all seven cities in December. The one I expect to have moved is Chiang Mai, where a dormant group of 240 people is sitting on the name everybody types into the search box.