7/9/2019: This post is out-of-date. Please see the 2019 update.
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Please note cagey blog title wording. A title like Spain Visa Renewal Steps or How to Renew Your Spain Visa would suggest an offering of authoritative advice on how to renew your Spain student visa, or au pair visa, or entrepreneur visa, or whatever the hey other type of visa you bagged to permit life-over-the-long-haul on the Iberian Peninsula.
Authoritative visa advice, in this blog?! Ha ha ha ha!
I can confidently tell you what I did to renew my non-lucrative residence visa. (Live in Spain = yes. Work permit = no.) I have no idea if my saga will help you renew your visa, or get you goose-stepped in leg irons to the Pyrenees frontier. Caveat emptor.
The rest of this entry will aspire to matter-of-fact tedium, and shall be mercifully Vaudeville hooked to a quiet .pdf of its own, linked below.
Two cautionary notes first:
(♦) With one to-be-described exception, I completed all visa renewal steps in Spanish: plugged Spanish search terms into Google, read Spanish instructions on Spanish government web sites, conversed in Spanish at Spanish bureaucracies. ¿No lo hablas bien? Plan on renewing your visa with professional help. I retain fond memories of Spainwide, which helped me in 2016.
(♦) Visa-related chores are tough, tedious, devourers of time and patience.
Treat yourself to a Google StreetView look at the Avenida de los Poblados and Calle Manuel Luna centers. (Inexplicably absent from TripAdvisor’s Madrid Travel Guide.) An expat can while away hours in these places, in lines in front and in thumb-twiddling waits inside.
I am living a near life of Riley in Spain. Visa renewal is the price tag. (On the bright side: my freshly renewed visa is now good for two years, rather than the single year of the visa issued to me in San Francisco. I won’t need to deal with renewal chores again until 2019.)
On to the bolts and nuts:
https://transitophile.com/chango/files/visa/how_I_renewed_non_lucrative_spain_visa_2017.pdf
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Revised 8/27/17 to add information on visa term.
Interesting read. I found help with my Investor Visa from https://spainresidency.com . My Spanish is not the best yet, although I am going to classes. Found your blog by accident Tim and enjoying the content.