Getting Spanish Nationality in 2025 – a bureaucratic odyssey

These days, a lot of Americans want to move to Spain.

And they have questions.

Is it easy to get a job? What sort of visa do I need?

Can I eventually get Spanish nationality?

I’ve talked about some of these questions before. But I haven’t said much about Spanish nationality, because it’s complicated, and because I hadn’t been through the process myself.

Now, I think it’s time.

First, though, a caveat: immigrant life is often difficult and discouraging.

I’ve told my story on here before: how I moved from Arizona at age 21, overstayed a tourist visa, and worked under the table for several years in Madrid – living a semi-fugitive lifestyle and hoping things would eventually work out.

They did, but that life isn’t for everyone.

A lot of the Americans trying to move to Spain in 2025 are baby boomers, now retired, with large nest eggs. If you’ve got $5000 a month (or you’re selling a house worth a million) a lot of things are easier.

But I also found that with some youthful enthusiasm and a willingness to flout legal convention, I was able to make good things happen as well.

Moving abroad isn’t for the easily discouraged. But if you’re committed and willing to hang in there despite the (inevitable) disappointments along the way, you’ll probably be able to work things out.

I’m currently living the Spanish dream – basically. But it’s been a long journey.

For more information on immigration-related issues, check out my other articles: work permits in Spain, the one on the digital nomad visa, my experience buying a flat, etc. The Golden Visa, as I’ve mentioned, is on the way out.

For now, let’s talk about getting Spanish nationality.

Ways of getting Spanish nationality

There are various ways of getting Spanish nationality.

The fastest way seems to be to marry a Spanish person, which will get you nationality after just one year living legally in Spain. Getting married is, for some reason, a long and tedious bureaucratic process over here, but if you’re going to live abroad for any length of time, you’d better just get used to those.

If the “marrying a Spaniard” option is off the table for whatever reason, you could try one of the following:

• Be from a former Spanish colony. If you’re from Latin America, the Philippines, or (somehow) Puerto Rico you can get Spanish nationality after two years legal residency.
• Be born to Spanish parents, or have demonstrable Spanish ancestry – a Spanish grandparent who fled during the Civil War, for example. A lot of people go this route, but it’s not easy. I don’t just have my grandfather’s birth certificate on hand. Do you?
• Get really good at basketball, so they give you a passport by Royal Decree and ask you to play on the national team. This isn’t common but it occasionally happens.

Or you could do what I did, and just stick around for a very long time.

If you’re not from a former colony, and not good at basketball, the wait is ten years of legal residency before you can apply. Once you’ve applied, it takes a while to get approved and have a Spanish birth certificate issued.

And you should consult a lawyer about any of these options that may apply to you. This is a short article and I’m not a legal expert of any kind, so there’s probably some missing nuance here. (Sephardic Jews and people from Portugal, Andorra and Equatorial Guinea apparently also get the two year plan. It’s complicated.)

Also, I’m using the word “nationality” because in Spanish they say “la nacionalidad española”. You may prefer the word “citizenship” in English – I haven’t heard anyone use the Spanish word “ciudadanía” at any part of this process, though.

I may also use the words “visa” and “work permit” interchangeably. Hire a good lawyer and sue me, if you want. Technically, a visa just allows you to enter the country – if you’re staying for a long time, the document you want is a work and/or residence permit.

A tangent about the “nationality by Royal Decree” crowd

Please permit me a slight tangent here: I don’t mean to pick on Spanish national basketball star Lorenzo Brown, born in Rockford, Illinois, who got Spanish nationality in 2022 despite having never set foot in Spain.

It’s tough to find people around here who are tall enough to play point guard. And someone in the government really wanted to win those basketball games!

In any case, I’m sure there are football players who have been nationalized by Royal Decree as well, so it’s not just basketball. I also remember that Ricky Martin got his nationality by decree back in 2011.

Remember Ricky Martin?

I was, at that time, embroiled in the gritty reality of my immigrant hustle, and didn’t appreciate the fact that the government was just handing out passports to the rich and famous.

And guess what? My opinion about almost everything else has changed in the past decade or so – but I still find it VERY ANNOYING that they do this.

Oh well. I’m just a nobody, and that’s life.

These days there’s a Non-Lucrative Visa for people with enough money or passive income to live in Spain without working. If you’ve got that kind of money, you can hang out, renew the visa for five years, and then apply for long-term residency and – finally – for nationality.

(Or, presumably, you could apply for nationality sooner if you’re on the NLV and you’re from a former Spanish colony. Have I mentioned you should talk to a lawyer about all this?)

Rebel without a Spanish work permit

When I was younger, and making ends meet on an envelope full of illicit 20s and 50s in Madrid’s second-worst neighborhood, this nationality business all seemed pretty abstract.

Why bother with bureaucracy? I’ll be forty by the time I can apply!

Little did younger me know that those years were going to pass one way or another – legally or illegally.

By the time I reached my late 20s, I’d decided I might as well make a plan for adult life.

So I overcame my fear of bureaucracy and did a process called arraigo social. That’s where you prove you speak some Spanish, and that you’re integrated in society and ready to work. You have to wait at least three years (although in my case it was longer, because of several factors) and then present your documents.

If approved, they’ll give you papers and a “path to citiezenship”, which isn’t a bad deal at all.

Like I said, though, I moved to Spain in 2004 and didn’t get my arraigo approved until over 7 years later.

I was able to work under the table during those years, and rent rooms in shared flats. I was in my 20s, and life was pretty exciting. But technically, I wouldn’t wish that sort of lifestyle on most people. It’s rough.

Life among the normies

When I finally got approved back in 2012, Spain was in the middle of a very long economic crisis.

By that time, most of the smart people my age had left. But I was hanging in – for one thing, because I loved Spain, and for another, because I had nowhere else to go.

Selling used pickup trucks on a dusty car lot outside Phoenix never really appealed to me, and my anti-authority streak kept (and keeps) me from pursuing “real jobs”.

So, I figured, getting legal was a step in the right direction for building a life in Spain: I could work on contract, pay some taxes, and be a regular member of polite society, just like everyone else.

The crisis couldn’t possibly last forever.

The only problem was, I had to work a certain number of days a year in order to renew my work permit, and the extreme seasonality of English teaching made that difficult.

Also, nobody wanted to have teachers on contract anyway. At least in those days, they preferred to pay cash and avoid the social security taxes. So for a while, my life as a legal resident looked a lot like my life as an illegal.

Oh well. I managed – scraping together enough on-contract work days to renew a few times.

After five years of renewing your work permit, you can apply for long-term residency, which gives you a few more options. In my case, it also gave me the ability to work as a freelancer, which is what I needed to get my online business off the ground. I walked away from the Spanish labor market and never looked back.

The end of the bureaucratic labyrinth?

When I got the long-term residency in 2017, I thought my adventures with Spanish bureaucracy were mostly over. Just hang in for 5 more years and then apply for nationality.

But a few weeks later I met Morena.

She’d come to Spain for a doctoral program which didn’t work out.

When she quit, various lawyers told us that the government wasn’t going to renew her “highly qualified” visa – and that she should, in fact, be on her way back to India.

But she got another job up in Barcelona, and we did pareja de hecho, starting the long process of getting her a new work and residence permit.

The only problem? She had to go back to India when her current permit expired, and apply for the new one at the Spanish embassy in Mumbai.

This was in early 2020. We barely got her back to Spain before everything locked down.

Sitting up in the bed in our tiny flat in Barceloneta, she got a job for some startup and did meetings and phone calls in her sweatpants for several months, while the morons in the government made it illegal to walk outdoors.

Morena was able to get legal again because of “reagrupación familiar” – basically, because I was legal, we were a couple, and I had the means to support her. Again, not a bad deal. But sending her to India to apply was expensive.

(This process might have been easier if I were Spanish – as an American going through it with an Indian, it was long and tedious and presumably could have gone either way. And here’s another caveat for those who are hoping to get a quicker nationality by marrying a Spaniard: they count your period of legal residency, so if you enter Spain as the husband or wife of a Spaniard, you still need to get a NIE, register the marriage, etc.)

Ten years of legal residency

“Two weeks to flatten the curve” somehow became two years of insanity.

The morons in the government made sure we lived in a virus-themed dystopia for two more winters.

The original lockdowns were declared unconstitutional by the courts, but still, those are months of my life I’ll never get back. Thanks, Pedro Sánchez. And what came after was just as bad. I don’t want to talk about it.

Anyway, I managed not to get arrested for being outside and came through the whole thing with a clean criminal record – which was challenging, because what was legal and what was illegal was changing every five minutes.

By mid-2022, I’d finally completed my 10 years of legal residency in Spain, so I contacted a lawyer about the papers I’d need to apply for nationality. This was going to take a few more years, I knew.

But once again, I started to feel like I was coming to the end of the Spanish bureaucratic labyrinth.

Applying for Spanish Nationality

Just for informational purposes, you need a few documents if you’re going to get Spanish nationality.

This list is not complete, but here goes:

• A police background check from your country of origin (in the case of the US, it’s from the FBI) with a translation and an apostille.
• Your birth certificate, also with translation and an apostille.
• A DELE certificate from Instituto Cervantes, saying that you speak Spanish at an A2 level or higher. (I think A2 is a ridiculously low level to go handing out nationalities to people, but that’s just my opinion.)
• A certificate saying you’ve passed the CCSE test of “Conocimientos Constitucionales y Socioculturales de España” – an exam that will ask you some basic questions about the Spanish government, the Constitution, and the culture.

I mention the “apostille” up there a couple of times.

If you’re a regular person, just living your life, you probably haven’t even heard of the Apostille of the Hague before now. But it’s basically a stamp giving international validity to documents.

I used a service for this: it’s called Continentalis.eu and they had some trouble with the slowness of the Arizona government, but they got it all done for me.

All I had to do was give my lawyer my fingerprints for the background check.

Consular adventures and the CCSE exam

Of course, you could always do your FBI background check the old fashioned way: go to the US consulate, and wait for two hours while the entire consular section is on coffee break. Then discover that the “entire consular section” is just one bored lady, who you now have to argue with about the basics of how to do her job.

She’ll charge you $75 for an official FBI fingerprint card, at which point you can wander across town to the “Scientific Police” – kind of a Spanish CSI – for fingerprinting, then mail the fingerprints to Washington DC, etc.

(I think my mom was able to apply for the Apostille of the Hague for me the previous time I did this. Possibly with the office of the Arizona Secretary of State. Either way, it was a huge pain. If you’ve got the money, Continentalis is a lot easier. They take care of the official translations, too. Talk to Joanne, tell her I sent you. Also, consult a lawyer.)

So after 10 years of legal residence, like I said, I gathered the documents.

I took the test of Spanish constitutional and cultural knowledge. It isn’t difficult if you’ve been paying attention while living here, and there’s a free app from the Instituto Cervantes you can use to practice the questions. (The answer to one of the questions was “tapas”. Hooray for Spanish cuisine!)

Finally, I went down to Madrid to present everything at the Colegio de Abogados, which my lawyer said might be a little bit faster than going through the immigration office.

Spanish nationality: Case closed

In cinema, there’s something called a McGuffin.

A McGuffin is an object that moves the plot along: something the characters want, something that inspires them to action. It’s the briefcase that the characters in Pulp Fiction are chasing, or the Holy Grail to Monty Python’s knights.

For years, my McGuffin has been a Spanish passport.

So I’ve waited in lines, I’ve filled in forms, I’ve refreshed government websites at 8AM to see if new appointments can be made to appear. I’ve dealt with the tax burden, and obeyed the law, and done everything I could to be a clean-living, respectable member of the Spanish middle class.

Most importantly, though, the quest for Spanish nationality kept me from leaving when times got tough – as they have, more than once in the last couple of decades.

After presenting the final Nationality documents at the Colegio de Abogados, my lawyer told me that the wait could be months, or years. “Don’t check the website for updates every day,” he said. “It won’t make things go any faster.”

So I didn’t. But I checked it from time to time. A year passed, then fifteen months. The government website always just said “en trámite” – in other words, that they were still processing my paperwork.

Finally, last week, about sixteen months in, I was lying in bed just before turning off the light, and decided to log on to see the status of my application.

Ooh, there’s a lot more text on this website than usual.

My heart stopped for a moment. Did this mean they’d resolved my case? My eyes skimmed down the long block of Spanish legalese looking for the key word.

There it was!

DENEGADA.

My application for Spanish nationality had been rejected.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. I warned you there were going to be moments of disappointment in this journey. All told, I’ve been very lucky. There’s probably a “to be continued” in here somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is, yet. I’ll keep you posted. If you’re an American hoping to move to Spain (or elsewhere in Europe) check out my friend Cepee, who’s got a Visa Guide to Living in Europe. She’s done a lot of research into the various visa schemes.

P.P.S. Another thing that people sometimes find discouraging when they move to Spain is the fact that Spanish salaries aren’t very good. I’ve talked more about that in my article on work culture in Spain, and (more recently) in my response to The Economist’s claim that Spain has the world’s best economy. Enjoy!

P.P.P.S. A common rumor about Spanish nationality is that you have to give up your US Citizenship in order to get it. I’ve written about that, too. The “long story short” version is that you don’t have to, but you can. I’ve talked to my lawyer about it several times. Have you?