'Never been this bad': Your problems booking residency appointments in Spain

The issue of finding available 'citas previas' for residency permits in Spain has been a problem for years, but in recent months it's only getting worse. The Local asked its foreign readers about their experiences when trying to book these appointments.

The main issue is when it comes to booking online appointments for administrative processes that are absolutely necessary to maintain or obtain residency in Spain.

Whether you’re from the EU and need to get your green certificate or you’re from a non-EU country and need to get your TIE (Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero), you will need to make an appointment or cita previa to do so at your local extranjería (foreigners’ office or police station.

You will also need another appointment when it comes to renewing your TIE after the first initial five years, which many British people with Brexit Withdrawal Agreement residency status in Spain are now having to do.

In a nutshell, there never seems to be any appointments available online on the Spanish government's sede electrónica website.

People try for weeks or months to book a cita previa, sometimes they get lucky eventually, often they don't.

This situation has been going on for years, but it seems that it is particularly bad at the moment due to two main issues.

The first is Spain's new immigration law which came into force at the end of May, which seeks to regularise the residency documents for potentially hundreds of thousands of foreigners in Spain and make the system more efficient.

While this is good news in the long term, in the short term it is putting an extra strain on extranjería offices which already have overstretched staff. Immigration office workers have reported that they feel "overwhelmed" with the new workload and even went on strike in some areas.

The second reason is that in recent years, criminal gangs have been using bots and other technology to book up all the appointments as soon as they’re released and sell them to people for a profit.

Although many of these criminals have been arrested by Spanish police, the con keeps happening.

Booking these appointments should be completely free, but without the option and having no choice but to get or renew their residency cards, many are forced to pay out get them from law firms or other more questionable sources.

We recently asked some of our foreign readers what challenges they had faced in trying to get an appointment.

One reader from the Basque Country said that she has been living in Spain since April, and after trying for several weeks to get a cita previa, she had to hire a gestor to get an appointment. This was the same for her Irish husband to get his green residency document as it was for her to get one for her TIE.

Another reader based in Jávea town in Alicante province wrote: “I have phoned in once a day, sometimes twice or three times for over four weeks now, and still no appointment. This is to change my Green Residence Certificate to a TIE card. Yet I hear some people have no trouble, using a middleman, but hear they have paid up to €100. Feeling unhappy and very frustrated”.

One reader confirmed that there were no appointments in Dénia, also in the Alicante province, after trying for a while to get one and another confirmed there were none available in Mallorca either.

A reader in Valencia said it took them 58 days from their visa approval to get a toma de huellas appointment (fingerprinting appointment). “I tried getting an appointment every day at different times. I often would get all the way to selecting an appointment only to have them gone between the time of filling out my phone number and email and selecting the time”, they said.

It’s not just people in Spain's popular coastal areas who can't get over the cita previa wall, however; even in the Spanish capital it’s an issue. “To book our initial (fingerprint) TIE appointment in Madrid, we had to wait 6 weeks, and the only police station offering citas previas was in Aranjuez, at the very southern edge of the region. It took us 90 minutes by metro and bus to get there,” another reader reported.

The Local Spain was also contacted by an Alicante-based agency helping foreigners get visas and residency documents. “We have processed over 3,000 successful residency applications (both EU and non-EU) and we have never known it as difficult as this to get appointments - even during Brexit. It's absurd,” they explained.

“We have a team of nine staff who all 'jump' on the appointments as soon as we see they are available. We are lucky if we get two appointments booked. What chance does anybody have to comply with the law, if the immigration department cannot get a grip on their ludicrous online booking system?”, they added.

It's difficult to know what to do in this situation. Do you perpetuate the problem by buying appointments or do you stand your ground and risk not having a valid residency document?

For its party, the British Embassy in Madrid has asked the Spanish government to make more appointments available and the government also recently announced that in the future they AI to scrap the dreaded appointment system.

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'Never been this bad': Your problems booking residency appointments in Spain