We got our Permanent Residency in Spain! Reflections and on where we go from here…

We got our Permanent Residency in Spain!

Last week we got our Permanent Residency is Spain! The last 5 years have at times felt long. But we had a goal when we came to Spain – we wanted to get residency in a country other than Canada.  We’ve achieved that.

Our very first post on this blog addressed that:  Why Spain? How we got here.

In this post I’ll cover what Permanent Residency in Spain means to us, will reflect on the last 5 years, and also tell you our plans. They may surprise a few people.

What’s does it mean to get Permanent Residency in Spain?

First of all, I should be clear about the definition: our new residency cards say “Larga duración”. This is the correct wording for permanent residency in Spain for non-EU citizens.

There are different reasons why getting permanent residency is important to people. For some it means they are allowed to work in Spain. For others, it means bringing your parents to live with you in Spain. 

For us, getting Permanent Residency means that we have a base in Europe that we can always come back to but with the freedom of being able to travel as we wish. The only restriction is that we aren’t allowed to be out of Spain for more than 12 months consecutively. So, as long as we are 1 day per year in Spain, we cannot have our permanent residency revoked. As our lawyer told us, there is no law on the minimum number of days required to be in Spain.

Another thing: to get Permanent Residency you need to have 5 years of continuous empadronamiento in Spain. We know: a few years ago we wanted to just travel around Spain without having a permanent base. Our lawyer shut that down: “you need empadronamiento in order to prove that you’ve been living in Spain”. For most people, that means signing a lease*.

 *For those who maybe don’t know, once you have a lease you can register at the local city hall. Being on the official registry means you have “empadronamiento”.

Once you have Permanent Residency, empadronamiento is no longer required. It will only be required in 5 years when we have to renew our residency cards.

So really what it boils down to for us is having residency in Spain while also having the freedom to travel just about as much as we want.

This post covers most of the important technical points you should know about Permanent Residency: Why you should get Permanent Residency in Spain

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Reflections on 5 years in Spain

Looking back, our 5 years in Spain have been a roller coaster. Imagine, the first two years in Spain we were in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. In fact we chose Nerja as our first base because travel between provinces wasn’t allowed when we arrived – NLV visa in hand – to Spain. We felt that we had to chose fast. And finding an apartment was easy, with all the covid restrictions in place there were a lot of empty apartments. We found a 3-bedroom townhouse within 10 days (rent: 800 Euros/month). Nerja was actually a good base for the 2 ½ years we lived there (despite a few things I’ll cover further below).

Things changed for us in mid-2022 when travel got back to “normal”: Nerja became swamped with incoming tourists and expats.

Nerja was followed by Antequera for a year (a beautiful city) and Granada, our current home where we’ve been for the last year-and-a-half. Total all that up and it adds up to 5 years.

We’ve learned a lot about ourselves during that time. When we came to Spain, more specifically Nerja, we felt that we were ready to “settle”. After 6 years of full-time travel, we had a house, a large yard, and trees and bushes in our property. We spent a lot of money on plants, pots, earth and gravel. We would embrace gardening.

It was pure hell.

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An excerpt from my 2022 year-end post on my other blog:

We did a lot of gardening which honestly was more about maintenance than about enjoyment. I mentioned that last year we had a huge problem with Asian Tiger Mosquitos (which are aggressive daytime mosquitos that you’ll find along the coasts of Spain). I fixed the problem by cleaning out all undergrowth in our gardens and covering the earth with mosquito netting and rocks. No more Asian Tiger Mosquitos! But the problem this year has been mealy bugs and ants. Summer was a never-ending battle spraying our lemon tree and bougainvillea using natural “solutions” found on the internet: soap and water solutions, apple cider vinegar and water. Just know that all that is a crock of shit. None of it helped. In the end I decided to cut back half of our lemon tree and trim our bougainvillea down to nothing. Just know that it all grows back quickly (it’s amazing how aggressively nature comes back along the coasts of Spain).

When it wasn’t mealy bugs it was cockroaches. After seeing a couple of huge cockroaches in the apartment last year we did a ton of sealing up this spring/summer. Our complex was built in the 1970’s and there seem to be a lot of crawl spaces behind walls and under floors. We sealed up everything and also put mosquito netting on all windows to stop all creepy crawlies. The neighbours must think we’re crazy. Nobody else screens their windows. But we didn’t get any cockroaches until September when suddenly we started seeing baby cockroaches emerging from our downstairs bathroom. We set up cockroach traps everywhere, sealed up the bathroom door shut with duct tape, and started a routine of washing the floor with a mixture of water and bleach every night before going to bed. Every morning we’d wake up to 4 or 5 dead baby roaches which whittled down to 2 or 3….we haven’t seen any in 2 months now but have maintained our washing the floor habit.

When it’s not the mealy bugs or cockroaches it’s the cats. The stray cats all over the property which linger because we have 2 wacko lady neighbours who insist on feeding them. Our neighbour next door “has” 4 cats (“has” = she has 4 cats that spend most of their days in the common space and jumping into people’s yards).

We have nothing against cats but when they come into our yard peeing and taking dumps we get upset. So the summer was a running battle of setting up natural barriers, putting spikes in our plants (so cats don’t use them as a litter box), and always having the garden hose handy.

As I say, we seem to have spent a lot of time maintaining and protecting our property and apartment rather than enjoying it.

Our experience in Nerja made us realize that we’re not “domestic” people, that a house and huge yard wasn’t for us.  Back in Canada we had a condo which we could lock up and return to a month or two later. That was what we were used to. Coming to Spain we thought we could adapt to a different, more sedentary lifestyle. In fact I remembered Lissette saying that having a house (which is basically what this townhouse was) was something she had always wanted. Two years of that cured both of us for life. We felt like slaves to that house and yard. Never again.

We moved to Antequera where we downsized to a small and modern 2-bedroom apartment. We went back to the lifestyle we were used to, including a lot of travelling in Spain as well as overseas (while keeping within the limits allowed by temporary residents). A year later, in 2024, we decided that a year in Antequera was enough and moved to Granada. That’s where we are today.

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“You’re living the dream!”

We were at the train station in Malaga and got in a conversation with a couple of American tourists. They asked us where we came from and we told them we lived in Spain. Their faces lit up. That’s when they said the above.

Are we living the dream?

The truth is that we’ve felt that we’re trying to fit a round peg into a square hole when it comes to Spain. We should love it. It’s beautiful, it’s cultural, it has plenty of sun. It’s safe, it’s affordable, it’s in many ways first world. On top of that we speak the language, so it should be a natural fit for us.

But I compare Spain to our time in Croatia. We came to Croatia in 2015 and absolutely fell in love with it, so much so that in 2017 we decided to take a year off from travelling and live in Croatia. We became temporary residents and actually contemplated working towards permanent residency. Unfortunately it all went sideways because of their difficult (and unclear) immigration rules towards non-EU nationals. But we loved Croatia.

We’ve chosen Spain. But the truth is we haven’t fallen in love with it. Maybe that will change in the future. But as I say, so far it’s been like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.

I don’t like to admit the above because I feel guilty. Most people think exactly like that American couple. Why aren’t we loving it? Why aren’t we more appreciative* of the fact that we’re “living the dream?”.

*Note: While many other countries are increasingly making residency for foreigners difficult, Spain has given us the opportunity to work towards permanent residency. Don’t mistake our feelings for lack of appreciation. We feel very grateful to Spain and consider ourselves very lucky to have permanent residency here.

Having said the above, we haven’t given up on Spain. And now being Permanent Residents, we feel like it’s a new start. But before that, we’ve decided that we’re going to take a break from Spain…

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Our Plans

In early 2020, we had decided to stop travelling full-time and to work towards residency in Spain. Truth be told, neither of us had wanted to stop travelling. We enjoyed the lifestyle and the freedom. But we had always said that we wanted permanent residency somewhere before we got to the age of 60. We felt we needed a backup plan to Canada (which is a great country when working but not the place we wanted to “retire”).

Now that we have Permanent Residency and the freedom that comes with it, we’re going back to full-time travel. We’re nearing 60, we know that our window is getting smaller.

So in early 2026 we’ve going to start travelling full-time again. We’ll start locally: travelling around Spain for a few months, seeing some places we haven’t been. We’ll actually be seeing a lot of Spain because while Permanent Residency allows us more time outside of Spain, we still have to follow the 90/180 Schengen rules. Plus, as mentioned above, we aren’t technically allowed to be outside Spain for 12 months continuous. So we’ll always be back in Spain.

All to say that this blog won’t become irrelevant: we’ll probably have more Spain content here than ever going forward. But that’s going to be mixed in with other destinations: we’re planning on spending several months each in France, the UK , and the Czech Republic before going to Central America later in the year.

Long-term

Long-term we still see ourselves settling in Spain somewhere. We’ve often felt that we’re not the typical expat/immigrant in Spain. Give us 5 to 10 years, maybe by that time we’ll be in a different mindset and embrace Spain more than we have. Time will tell. Until then we’re keeping all options open while also being immensely grateful for having obtained Permanent Residency in Spain.

If curious about the full-time travel lifestyle, a few posts from our other blog that might interest you:

• 9 pieces of Advice for those thinking of living a Nomadic Lifestyle
• How much does it cost to have a nomadic lifestyle?

Related: The best things about living in Spain

Related: Things I wish I had known before moving to Spain