How to Get Spanish Citizenship

Spain recognises five ways to become a Spanish citizen: by origin, by option, by residence, by carta de naturaleza, and by recovering a nationality you once held. They are set out in articles 17 to 26 of the Spanish Civil Code. Which one applies to you depends almost entirely on your family history, not on how much you earn or invest.

The Democratic Memory route closed on 22 October 2025

This is the single most common piece of outdated advice about Spanish citizenship still circulating online, and it matters because it sent a lot of people down a road that no longer exists.

The eighth additional provision of Law 20/2022 of 19 October, the Law of Democratic Memory, opened a temporary window for people born outside Spain whose parent or grandparent had originally been Spanish and lost or renounced that nationality after going into exile. It also covered children born abroad to Spanish women who lost their nationality by marrying a foreigner before the 1978 Constitution came into force. The provision gave applicants two years from the date the law took effect, with the Council of Ministers allowed to extend it by one further year.

The Government used that single extension. The window ran until 22 October 2025 and then closed. Spanish consulates confirmed at the time that no further extension would be granted and that requests made after that date would not be processed. Only people who had already requested an appointment before the cut-off and held a confirmation code were allowed to appear afterwards to hand in their paperwork.

Three things are still true after the closure, and they get lost in the noise. Applications filed before the cut-off are live and are still being decided. The 25 October 2022 instruction is explicit that a declaration lodged in time can still be authenticated by the registry after the window closed, so if you got yours in, your file survived the deadline. What does carry a deadline is you: if the registry asks for missing evidence, you have thirty calendar days to produce it. If a parent of yours obtained Spanish nationality through the window, that changes your own position, because you may now be the child of a Spaniard rather than the grandchild of one. And the ordinary rules in the Civil Code were never part of the window, so they survived it untouched.

The five ways to get Spanish citizenship

1. Citizenship by origin: you may already be Spanish

Article 17 of the Civil Code makes you Spanish from birth if your father or mother was Spanish when you were born. Where you were born does not matter and neither does the passport you have used your whole life. This is not an application, it is a registration: the birth is entered in the Spanish Civil Registry through the consulate that covers your area, and the nationality is recognised rather than granted.

Article 17 also covers people born in Spain to foreign parents where at least one of those parents was also born in Spain, and children born in Spain who would otherwise be left stateless. If your parentage or your birth in Spain is only established after you turn eighteen, that fact alone does not make you Spanish, but it gives you the right to opt for Spanish nationality of origin within two years of the determination.

A surprising number of Americans who assume they face a ten year wait are in fact in this category already. It is worth checking before you plan anything else.

2. Citizenship by option: the descendant route that stayed open

Article 20 gives a right to opt for Spanish nationality to three groups: people who are or have been under the parental authority of a Spaniard, people whose father or mother was originally Spanish and born in Spain, and the people covered by the second paragraphs of articles 17 and 19.

The second group is the one that matters most to families in the United States. Both conditions have to be met together: the parent must have been Spanish by origin and must have been born on Spanish soil. A grandparent born in Spain is not enough for this route. In exchange, article 20.3 removes the age limit that normally applies to option, so there is no deadline based on how old you are, and you do not need to move to Spain to claim it. The declaration is made at the Spanish consulate with jurisdiction over where you live.

3. Citizenship by residence: the route most people take

Article 22 sets the qualifying periods. The residence has to be legal, continuous and immediately before the application, which means holiday stays and time on a tourist stamp do not count. You need a residence permit first, and then the clock starts.

Article 22.2 reduces the requirement to a single year of legal residence for:

• Anyone born on Spanish territory.
• Anyone who did not exercise the right to opt in time.
• Anyone who was legally under the guardianship, curatorship with full powers of representation, custody or fostering of a Spanish citizen or institution for two consecutive years.
• Anyone married to a Spaniard for a year at the time of the application, and not separated legally or in fact.
• The widow or widower of a Spaniard, if there was no legal or de facto separation when the spouse died.
• Anyone born outside Spain whose father, mother, grandfather or grandmother was originally Spanish.

That last case is the second door still open to descendants, and it is the natural fallback for the families that missed the Democratic Memory deadline. It works for grandchildren, and unlike the option route it does not require the Spanish ancestor to have been born in Spain, only to have been Spanish by origin. The trade-off is that you have to actually live in Spain on a valid residence permit for a year before you can file. For a lot of people that means arriving on a non-lucrative visa or a digital nomad visa and counting from there.

Two further conditions apply to every residence application. Article 22.4 requires you to show good civic conduct and a sufficient degree of integration into Spanish society, and that second requirement is tested by exam. More on that below.

4. Carta de naturaleza: discretionary and genuinely rare

Article 21.1 allows Spanish nationality to be granted by carta de naturaleza, awarded at the Government’s discretion by Royal Decree where exceptional circumstances apply. This is worth being blunt about, because it is widely misdescribed online as a fallback for people who have lived in Spain a long time or who married a Spaniard. It is not. There is no qualifying period you can complete and no checklist you can satisfy that obliges the Government to grant it. In practice it has been used for cases such as the victims of the 2004 Madrid bombings, members of the national sports teams and Sephardic applicants before the dedicated law existed. Assume it does not apply to you unless your circumstances are genuinely out of the ordinary.

5. Recovering Spanish nationality you lost

Article 26 covers people who were Spanish and lost it, which is a common story in families that emigrated. You declare your wish to recover it before the Civil Registry and register the recovery. Normally you also have to be a legal resident in Spain, but that requirement does not apply to emigrants or the children of emigrants, and the Ministry of Justice can waive it in other cases where exceptional circumstances apply.

What about marriage?

Marrying a Spanish citizen does not make you Spanish and it never has. What it does is shorten the residence requirement to one year under article 22.2.d. You still need a residence permit, you still need to be living in Spain, and you still sit the same exams. The marriage also has to be current when you apply, since legal or de facto separation removes the benefit.

Spanish dual citizenship: what Americans need to know

This is the first question almost every American asks and the one most pages answer badly, so here is the precise position.

Article 23.b of the Civil Code makes it a condition of validly acquiring Spanish nationality by option, carta de naturaleza or residence that the person declares they renounce their previous nationality. Two groups are exempt on the face of the article: nationals of the countries listed in article 24.1, which are the Ibero-American countries, Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and Portugal, and Sephardim originating from Spain. The United States is not on that list, so an American acquiring Spanish nationality by option, by carta de naturaleza or by residence does have to make the declaration.

There is one exemption that never appeared in the Civil Code, and it is worth stating precisely because it is repeated everywhere. The instruction issued by the Directorate General for Legal Certainty and Public Attestation on 25 October 2022 lifted the renunciation requirement for the Democratic Memory option under the eighth additional provision of Law 20/2022. The same instruction lists that as one of the differences between that route and the ordinary option in article 20.1.b, which does require the declaration. So the exemption reaches only files lodged inside the Democratic Memory window, and that window closed on 22 October 2025. If you are claiming now through a parent who was originally Spanish and born in Spain, you take the oath, you make the renunciation declaration and you register, the same as on the residence route.

The declaration is made before the Spanish Civil Registry or a notary. Under United States law, nationality is lost only by voluntarily performing one of the acts listed in 8 U.S.C. 1481 with the intention of relinquishing it, and a formal renunciation has to be made before a United States diplomatic or consular officer in a foreign state, in the form prescribed by the Secretary of State. A declaration made to a Spanish registrar is not that act. The oath of allegiance you take in Spain does appear in the same statute, at 1481(a)(2), which lists taking an oath or making a formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state among the potentially expatriating acts, and that is why the intention requirement is the whole ballgame and why we go through it with you before you swear rather than after. This is why so many people hold both in practice, and it is also why the situation is more delicate than the internet suggests.

Two points that follow from the same articles and are often mixed up. First, if you are already Spanish by origin under article 17 there is no acquisition at all, so article 23 never comes into play and neither does the loss rule above. Option under article 20.1.b is the opposite case: you do acquire Spanish nationality, the same instruction is explicit that what you acquire is not nationality de origen, and article 25.1.a is written for exactly that group, so the three year rule reaches you the same way it reaches someone who naturalised after ten years of residence. Second, article 24.1 works the other way round and protects Spaniards: a Spaniard who is emancipated, living habitually abroad, and voluntarily takes another nationality loses Spanish nationality after three years unless they declare before the Civil Registry that they wish to keep it, although acquiring the nationality of an Ibero-American country, Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea or Portugal is not enough on its own to cause the loss of Spanish nationality of origin.

France is a separate case worth knowing about because it is recent. A nationality convention between Spain and France signed at Montauban on 15 March 2021 has been in force since April 2022 and lets nationals of both countries hold both without renouncing either.

One more thing worth checking before you assume you are on the hard road. A great many Americans also hold the nationality of a Latin American country through a parent, most often Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba or Argentina, and have simply never used it. If that is you, both of the rules above change in your favour at once: the qualifying period drops from ten years to two under article 22.1, and article 23.b stops requiring the renunciation declaration, because you are a national of one of the listed countries. Both of those depend on you holding that nationality of origin, that is by birth or descent rather than by later naturalisation. It is the single most overlooked shortcut in Spanish nationality law and it costs nothing to check whether it applies to you.

Permanent residence or Spanish citizenship?

After five years of continuous legal residence you can apply for long-term residence, which lets you stay in Spain indefinitely and work without further permits, although article 32.5.c of the Immigration Act takes it away if you are absent from the territory of the European Union for twelve consecutive months. Citizenship takes ten years by the general rule. So the honest question is whether the extra five years buy you anything.

The two things that usually decide it are the passport and the children. A Spanish passport is an EU passport, so it turns Spain from a country you are allowed to live in into a continent you are allowed to live in, and it passes down. Long-term residence does neither. Against that, citizenship requires the renunciation declaration and the exams, and long-term residence requires neither. Plenty of Americans stop at long-term residence quite deliberately.

Requirements and documents

The two exams

Applications based on residence have to prove the integration requirement in article 22.4 by passing two tests run by the Instituto Cervantes under Royal Decree 1004/2015: the DELE at A2 level or above, which tests Spanish as a foreign language, and the CCSE, which tests constitutional and sociocultural knowledge. The CCSE is sixty per cent questions on the Constitution and on how Spain is organised administratively and territorially, and forty per cent on Spanish culture, history and society, all multiple choice.

The DELE is waived for people who already hold a DELE at A2 or above and for nationals of Spanish-speaking countries. United States citizens are not exempt, so plan for both exams. Applicants under eighteen and people whose legal capacity has been judicially modified prove integration differently, through certificates from the schools or centres they have attended.

The paperwork

• Full passport, valid and complete.
• Your Spanish residence card.
• Birth certificate, legalised or apostilled and translated by a sworn translator.
• Criminal record certificates from Spain and from your country of origin.
• Marriage certificate where relevant.
• Current and historical padrón registration, which is what proves continuity of residence.
• DELE A2 and CCSE certificates, or authorisation for the Ministry to check your results directly with the Instituto Cervantes.
• Evidence supporting integration, and for descent-based claims the civil registry records that connect you to your Spanish ancestor.

Descent cases live or die on that last line. You are reconstructing a chain of birth, marriage and death records across two countries and often across a century, and Spanish registry entries from before the civil war can be held in parish archives rather than in the Civil Registry. Our team handles that research and the sworn translations as part of the file rather than sending you off to find them.

How the application works and how long it takes

Residence applications are filed with the Ministry of Justice, electronically or on paper at a public registry office. Filing online is generally the better option because the file is tracked from the start and you avoid registry appointment queues.

Royal Decree 1004/2015 gives the administration a maximum of one year from the date the application enters the competent body to decide and notify. If that year passes with no express decision, the application is deemed refused by administrative silence, which opens the route to challenge it. Being deemed refused is a procedural position rather than a judgement on your case, and it is frequently the point at which a stalled file starts moving again.

Real waiting times vary a great deal by registry and by year, so treat any single figure you read online with caution. What is fixed is the legal deadline above and what happens when it passes.

Grants by residence and by carta de naturaleza lapse if you do not appear within one hundred and eighty days of notification to complete the requirements in article 23 (article 21.4). Claims by origin and by option are registrations rather than grants, so that clock does not run on them. Those requirements are the oath or promise of loyalty to the King and obedience to the Constitution and the laws, the renunciation declaration where it applies, and registration in the Spanish Civil Registry. The nationality exists from the moment of registration, and the passport follows.

How to Become a Spanish Citizen: Step by Step

This is the order that works on a residence file, from checking your years to collecting your first Spanish ID card. The requirements are explained above, so each step here covers only what you do and when.

Step 1: Count your years the way the Ministry will

Article 22.3 of the Civil Code asks for residence that is legal, continuous and immediately before the application. In practice that means your residence permits have to run back to back up to the day you file, and your current one has to be in force or extended because you filed its renewal on time. Pull out every card and resolution you have held and put the dates in a line before anything else. If you are at five years and citizenship is still some way off, long-term residence is the status to hold while you wait.

Step 2: Book and pass the DELE A2 and the CCSE

Both are booked with the Instituto Cervantes, and the dates drive the rest of the timetable. The CCSE runs on the last Thursday of every month except August and December. It has 25 multiple-choice questions, you pass with 15, the registration fee is €85, and results come out about 20 days later (Instituto Cervantes, September 2026). The DELE has its own calendar of sessions.

Watch the expiry dates. A DELE diploma never expires, but a CCSE pass is valid for four years from the date the results are approved. If you sit it too early, it can lapse before you file. Applicants who cannot read or write, or who have learning difficulties, can ask the Ministry of Justice for an exemption from both tests through its online office.

Step 3: Collect the documents, in the right order

The foreign birth certificate and the criminal record certificate from your country of origin need an apostille or consular legalisation and a sworn translation (article 5 of Royal Decree 1004/2015). They have to be valid on the day you file, not on the day of the oath, as the Ministry’s registry circular of 5 March 2021 confirms. So order the criminal record certificate last and file soon after it arrives.

Some papers you can skip. If you tick the authorisations in the application form, the Ministry checks your padrón address, your Spanish criminal record, your residence card data and your Cervantes results itself (articles 5.1.a and 6.4). Keep every original, because the registry can ask to see them at the oath.

Step 4: Pay the fee with form 790 code 026

The government fee for a residence application is €104.05 (Ministry of Justice, September 2026) and it can change with each state budget. You download form 790 code 026 from the Ministry of Justice’s online office and pay it at a bank. Each form carries its own number, so never photocopy one, and the payment has to be in the applicant’s name.

Step 5: File the application

The procedure is electronic by design (article 3 of Royal Decree 1004/2015). Online, you file through the Ministry of Justice’s online office with a digital certificate or Cl@ve and the AutoFirma app. A draft you start there is deleted automatically if you do not sign and submit it within two months. If you file on paper at a public registry office instead, the documents are scanned into the same electronic file. Our advisors can file for you with a signed authorisation, and professional representatives always file online.

Step 6: Answer any request and track the file

If the Ministry finds something missing, it sends a request to correct it. You have three months from that notice to answer, and if you do not, the application is treated as withdrawn (article 10.2). That is the most avoidable way to lose a file. You can follow the stage your file has reached in the Ministry’s online status check, and if you chose electronic notice, decisions arrive through the government’s DEHú notification inbox.

Step 7: The decision

The one-year legal deadline and the effect of silence are explained above. A refusal can be challenged by an administrative appeal for reconsideration (article 14 of Royal Decree 1004/2015) or directly before the administrative courts, which article 22.5 of the Civil Code keeps open in every case.

Step 8: Swear the oath within 180 days

Once the grant is notified you have 180 days to take the oath or promise, make the renunciation declaration if it applies to you, and ask for registration (article 21.4 of the Civil Code and article 12 of Royal Decree 1004/2015). Since the 2021 reform of article 68.3 of the Civil Registry Law 20/2011, you can do this at the Civil Registry of the address shown in the grant or before a notary, who sends the deed to the registry.

Take the grant, your passport and the originals of your birth certificate and criminal record certificate. If the registry cannot give you an appointment in time, the 2021 circular says the 180 days stop running while you wait, and you can ask for proof that you requested the appointment. Keep that proof.

Step 9: Registration, then your DNI and passport

The registry records the acquisition within five days of your declarations (article 13 of Royal Decree 1004/2015), and under article 68.1 of Law 20/2011 that entry is what makes you Spanish. Then ask the registry for a full birth certificate (certificación literal de nacimiento) issued for DNI purposes. With it, a padrón certificate no older than three months and a photo, you apply in person at a police station for your first DNI; the birth certificate must be less than six months old (article 5 of Royal Decree 1553/2005). The passport comes after, because it is issued against a valid DNI.

Our team runs this sequence for clients from the first count of years to the DNI appointment, including the legalisations and sworn translations.

Where to go from here

If your claim runs through a Spanish parent or grandparent, the first job is establishing exactly what your ancestor’s status was and when, because that single fact decides whether you are already Spanish, whether you can opt from abroad, or whether you need a year of residence in Spain. Our guide to Spanish citizenship by descent takes each case in turn: a Spanish parent, a Spanish grandparent, an ancestor who lost the nationality, and a claim filed before the Democratic Memory deadline. If you are on the residence track, the work is protecting the continuity of your permits so the clock never resets.

Our immigration lawyers at MySpanishResidency handle nationality files end to end, including the genealogical research, the legalisations and the sworn translations. If you want someone to run your case rather than explain it, see how we work on Spanish citizenship lawyer, or book a consultation and we will tell you which of the five routes is yours.