Lúdica Babysitters

Childcare is the one arrangement a family will not improvise. It is also the hardest thing to organise from another country, three days before a wedding, in a town where the usual answer is somebody’s cousin who is free on Thursday.

Lúdica exists to make that arrangement ordinary. Carolina Silva founded it in 2021 after decades running the children’s areas of hotels here — which is the part that matters, because it means the person assigning your sitter has spent her working life reading how a particular child behaves in a particular room. Some of the families who first hired her when their children were one year old are still booking her now that those children are teenagers.

The team is small on purpose: five or six sitters through most of the year, more in season, all of them working for Lúdica rather than found through an app. Every one is bilingual, has at least three years behind her, and has been through identity checks, references, a practical trial and a background check. Carolina does the matching herself, by age and by need.

Ask about the staffing rule before you book anything, here or anywhere. A baby under two takes a sitter of her own; a baby plus an older child takes two. Any service that puts one person in charge of a toddler and a six-year-old at the same time is quoting you a price, not a plan.

The practical shape of it: four hours is the minimum booking, a sitter arrives fifteen minutes early, and a 30% deposit is what actually holds the date. Worth knowing — that deposit never expires and the credit is transferable, so a cancelled trip is not money lost.