Spanish Residency Cards Finalized

My last post regarding our residency cards was in September. We were so relieved to finally have secured appointments for the entire family at the Oficina de Extranjeros in Alicante (calle campo de mirra 6) . Our appointments were November 11th and we were each assigned different times: 10:00am, 10:10am and 3:00pm (each 10 minutes long). We decided to go check in right away in hopes that we somehow get all the appointments taken care of all at once (and not have to come back again). After waiting in a room packed with people for an hour, and with great luck, the police officer who was managing the flow of traffic told the woman helping us to just do the paperwork for four of us. He must have been a father who had empathy for a family waiting so long with kids. Woohoo! We got all four appointments done in thirty minutes, just before they closed the building for lunch break. 

This was beautiful because it meant we could actually explore Alicante and enjoy the afternoon before heading back to Javea, which is exactly what we did. We left Alicante with four official documents that told us when we needed to return to collect the actual cards (about thirty days after our appointment).


December was a busy month with family visiting, holidays, and travel and we didn’t have a chance to get to Alicante to pick up the cards until January 14th. We dropped the kids off at school and made the trip. Of course, there was lots of waiting in a line (you can’t make an appointment for pickup). We had a moment of panic as we waiting in line and re-read the documents we needed for pick up which said we only had 11 days after our date of pick up (which was December 15th) to collect them. OMG. Did we do all this work and then slack off on pick up date, jeopardizing this whole process?!? Well, no pasa nada. 

We finally got to the front of the line and handed over our documents and passports. We were able to get our cards, but the bad news was that we couldn’t pick up the kids. Everybody has to go in person because they use your digital fingerprints to ID you. I found this really annoying because I didn’t want to pull the kids out of an entire day of school to simply pick up the cards, but such is life, and the funcionarios told us that the cards would remain there, so there was no hurry.

Fast forward to today, May 3rd. Today is a fiesta day in Javea (“Jesus Nazareno”) and there was no school yesterday or today because everything is closed. When I learned that this is only a local fiesta, and that it was business as normal in Alicante, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to take the kids to pick up their residency cards. Everything went really smoothly - the line wasn’t even that long of a wait. 

I decided to take the opportunity to ask one of the employees 
how to go about making an appointment for visa renewal, which is now our next bureaucratic adventure! I’m glad I asked because he informed me that since March 15th, things having changed. Going forward we will need to make an appointment in the Altea office and then afterward an appointment in the Benidorm office, rather than in Alicante. If I understood correctly this is better because Altea and Benidorm are half the distance. I will be sure to write about that experience once we’ve figured it out.

Only eight months of living in Spain and finally, we all have our residency cards! I know Spain well enough now to not be the least bit surprised.