It’s Complicated: Living with Spanish Bureaucracy

A cup of espresso and a laptop

Since early August, I’ve been patiently waiting for notification that our visa renewals have been approved.

I watched as others in multiple Facebook groups gleefully announced their approved renewals.

I panicked every time I saw someone say, “I have 10 days to submit XYZ information, or my visa renewal will be denied!” And then I ran to ChatGPT to find out what the snag they ran into might be.

Mid-October brought a ping to my inbox.

With fingers and toes crossed and a quick prayer that my anxiety would finally end, I opened the DEHú app (the Spanish government’s official notification app) alongside Google Translate.

Nope. Anxiety wasn’t going to end that day. Instead, it was a request for a form that had to be submitted within 10 days – a minor admin error, but still a hiccup in the process.

Let’s back up.

If you receive a notification via DEHú before your visa renewal is processed, it usually means one of two things.

1. Your visa application is being processed, and you have been officially notified that it is in the system.

2. Something in your application is missing, and the Spanish government needs it in their possession within 10 days, or you risk being denied.

So what happens once you provide the information they’re looking for?

I can tell you what doesn’t happen. You don’t get a notification telling you the government has received whatever remaining evidence you need to submit. Instead, if you check Mercurio, the online application platform, you can usually find whether or not what was missing is now in your submission file.

This process would ruffle the feathers of Gandhi himself.

Waiting, I suppose, is part of the “fun.”

Spain has up to 90 days to respond to a visa renewal like ours, and Valencia has been taking nearly every bit of that time to respond.

Just in case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not terribly patient. There’s an SMS number that foreign residents can text to check the status of their applications. I texted that number at least once a week – often more.

Nada. Crickets. For weeks.

A Gmail inbox

And then I received the DEHú notification, got my hopes up, and they were just as quickly dashed.

I filled out the form the day we received it, signed it, and returned it the same day. We lost one day in our visa process, and if that was the worst that happened, we could consider ourselves lucky.

Back to waiting, hoping, and wondering.

Last week, all that waiting finally paid off.

Three emails hit my inbox all at once: ping, ping, ping – a cacophony of bureaucracy making its way back into my life.

I was still missing one final email, so I did what I’d gotten so good at over the past few months. I waited a few more hours. Finally, that email arrived, and now I had to figure out the next step.

When you’re living on a temporary visa in a foreign country, there is a sort of uncertainty you learn to live with daily. Nothing is permanent, and you’re essentially living year to year until you finally earn the gold medal: permanent residency.

But getting there isn’t easy, and there’s a whole lot of “in between” to contend with in the meantime.

As the saying goes, you get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

So what comes after the approval?

More appointments. (Shocking, I know.)

Luckily, this time, I’m a little more versed in winding my way through the maze and climbing over the hedgerows to find the exit. Yesterday, thanks to our digital certificates, I was able to snag all four TIE fingerprinting appointments in early January – something I had no idea how to do the first time around.

Spain never rushes or hurries. If there is one thing this country is teaching me, it’s that bureaucracy will always be a pain in my ass. On the flip side, we’re always moving forward – learning something new, navigating another process, and giving myself another pat on the back for figuring it all out.

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