The biggest frustration of living in Spain is paperwork…….for the sake of paperwork. No wonder there are no proper trees anywhere - they’ve used all the forests (if there ever were any here in the first place) in making life as difficult as possible for you to obtain such simple things as your “residencia” or your “health card”.

You end up taking “everything” with you, including all bills (just to prove you live where you say you do), your marriage certificate (just to prove you´re married to the fella you’ve towed along with you), your padron (to prove you actually live here at all), your divorce certificate from 25 years ago (just in case),  your passport (once again to prove who you are, but as the passport is almost 10 years old, you now look nothing like the photo).
Then you get to the office of wherever you’re told to go, only to be told you need another piece of paper from another office 3 miles away, and as there is absolutely nowhere to park in Spain in August, you end up walking in 35 degrees, and then walk back to be told “we’re closing for siesta now, you need to come again tomorrow, and don’t forget to bring all your paperwork with you”.

You see people marching around from office to office, queuing inside and outside of town halls, health centres and police stations with huge amounts of plastic folders,  stuffed to the gunnels with all the things “they may need “ in order to get yet another piece of paper, to make you legal in Spain.

When you finally get to the office of where you should have gone in the first place, you take a “deli – ticket” of (hopefully) the correct department you want to visit and you wait. Your number comes up on the board, and you’re told where to go, you walk in, in total fear that they are almost definitely going to ask you for a piece of paper you haven’t got, and then they start the paperwork shuffle. It gets shuffled around the desk and you hear various Spanish mutterings which makes you think “oh no, now what do they want “– they wont speak English to you even if they can, but why should they, we live in their country after all. They then wander off for what seems an eternity (or at least a coffee break) - what are they doing? -  checking to see if I have a criminal record or something? They come back, mutter something else in Spanish as if asking a question which you can´t answer,  and then to your relief you get what you went in for.

This process could have by now taken at least 6 hours of your precious retirement time.

This is not to put you off coming to live in this lovely country, it is wonderful once you have all the paperwork in place, it´s just as a warning that if and when you have to do any of these tedious things, take a packed lunch, lots of water and preferably a collapsible chair that you can cart from office to office, and know you are going to be out for the day, and if you can, take someone who speaks Spanish better than you do.