Our first year of Spanish residency expired at the end of March.  I called the Oficina de Extranjeros in early march to make an appointment for renewal, but they didn’t have an appointment for us until early April.  I was really surprised that it was a 5+ week lead time to get a cita!

When we went to the Oficina de Extranjeros in Motril, they back-dated the application for renewal to 5 days before our expiration date, just to make sure there was no problem with us being here while in process.  On April 5, we submitted an updated copy of the same forms we needed to apply for the initial application, plus proof of medical insurance coverage, a copy of our financial documents (we provided our latest 401k statements to show sufficient funds, plus a month’s worth of recent transactions from our local bank here), copies of every page of all of our passports, and a letter from the school saying the kids were enrolled so that they didn’t need to come with us to the appointment.  We didn’t need photos this time, and the paperwork load was a lot lighter than it was for the first application!

The appointment was quick – she just verified the copies of our passports against the actual passports, and made sure we had the required documents, and we were done.  Then we waited for the letter from Granada.

The “inicio de procedimiento” letters finally arrived late last week (it took about 6 weeks).  Today I went online to request the forms required to pay the renewal fee at the bank (modelo 052), and then once I have paid the tasa I take the receipts back to Motril, so they can send them on to Granada.  And then we wait some more for the next letter!  This is a multi-step process… hopefully we’ll have our updated residency cards by July.

For anyone who might be going through the same process, here is some helpful information:  When I went to the URL to fill out modelo 052, the web URL gave me an invalid security certificate error, and I had to add an exception to my security rules to access it.  It looked like there was an option to pay online, but you have to have a digital DNI, which is a physical device (some sort of card reader) and a digital card that I think you can get from the ayuntamiento, but I did not have.  So the other option is to print the forms and bring them to a bank to pay.  You choose your province (Granada), and then fill out the form with your DNI, name and address.  I was a little confused at first about which box to check, but I called the Oficina de Extranjeros to confirm that the correct one was “2.2 Renovación de autorización de residencia temporal”.  The fee was 15,76 euros per person.