06.09.21 – Getting our Residencia
I’m sorry this next part has taken so long to put up – I’ve had a few personal things going on but I’m back into it now, here is this week’s instalment and part 4 will be next week!
Here we are……
We contacted a lawyer based in Seville and asked her whether we could apply for our Residencia through her.
Luckily, she said yes (of course she did, it wasn’t free haha!).
Now you must remember, this was all before Brexit, so things were easier then. I don’t know exactly how much harder it is now to apply for your residencia, but it is harder, takes longer and you need to have more money to show.
We wanted to get our residencia sorted ASAP because we knew Brexit was coming and that it wasn’t going to get any easier!
We also wanted to matriculate the car over to Spanish plates, so we asked the Lawyer to sort this for us too.
For our residencia, we needed to open a Spanish bank account and make sure we had enough money in it – I can’t remember the exact amount, but I think it was around 10,000 euros for both of us.
We chose to use Sabadell as it was the first bank we came across, but there are many to choose from.
As well as the bank account, we also needed to get private health insurance for a year. We asked our solicitor to sort this out for us too, she had a contact in an insurance company so that was the easiest way.
We sent all our paperwork off to the Lawyer, copies of passports, NIE certificate, proof of bank balance, signing forms for the application and proof of our private health insurance.
We then had a date to meet her in Seville at the foreigner’s office to, hopefully, get granted our residence cards.
This was in February 2019, we stayed in a lovely house for 2 weeks in a suburb on the outskirts of Seville, a place called Santiponce, and on 25th February we had our appointment.
We were pretty nervous – they could easily refuse (we had heard many stories of people being rejected). However, our Lawyer had everything organised and it was a pretty smooth and painless process.
Once that was out of the way, we made sure to enjoy some time in Seville. We found a lovely burger restaurant that we could take the dogs in to so we went there a few times.
I love Seville, it reminds me of Paris a little, and I’m so glad we got to spend some time there.
Our car matriculation was also being sorted, we had to send off all our car documentation to the Lawyer, and she was liaising with a garage who dealt with all the paperwork, getting it ready for a manual inspection at an ITV station. An ITV station is where you have your ‘MOT’ (in Spain ITV) and they are designated places, you can’t just take it to any garage like in the UK.
The paperwork took a while, so we didn’t use a garage in Seville, but more on that later!
After Santiponce we headed to our next stop, which was the other side of the country in Mojacar – as we drove there we passed back through the Axarquia and it made us realise how much we loved that area, we actually had big grins on our faces driving back through it.
We kept driving until we reached our next destination, where we had booked for a month’s stay.
As is the way, we didn’t end up staying there for the full month because we realised it just wasn’t for us and we were desperate to get back to the Axarquia!
We stayed in Mojacar for about 2 weeks – it wasn’t awful but the place we were staying had other people on the premises and it was hard with the dogs as they had dogs too and one of my dogs can be a bit of a twat with other dogs….
There were some good walks in the area though, and we even saw wild tortoises (which I loved and was surprised when we saw our first one as I guess I just didn’t ever think about where tortoises live in the wild, I’d only ever known them as pets!!).
We contacted the person who’s house we stayed at in The Axarquia and asked if we could come back and stay for a few months and they said yes so half way through March we headed back to our favourite place and settled in.
I will leave you with a photo of a tortoise and see you next week!
