My recommendation is not positive - Brian
Embassy day! We arrived at the embassy for our appointment and discovered that we weren’t the only ones that had been caught out by the change in the appointment system. Fortunately we had an actual appointment and were allowed into the embassy.
The embassy is not very big, and it appears there is exactly one person who deals with visa applications. When you include all the necessary documents, translations and photocopies our visa applications were each on the order of 100 pages. A brief digression on visas for Spain. There are a few types you can get in roughly 2 categories. Those that allow you to live but not work are family reunification, religious and retirement. Those that allow you to work require either a letter from a company in Spain stating you have a job or a lot of paperwork to document how you will start and run your own business. We were under the impression that a visa allowing you to work was the hardest to get since its similar to getting an H1B visa to work in the US.
So here we are, approaching the bank-teller-like window of the one person in the embassy who can help us live in Spain or reject us. As we got to the window she asked what type of visa we wanted. We replied a retirement visa. “My recommendation is not positive.” was the reply. Silence and a few stupefied blinks of the eye later Shannon and I both began our protest simultaneously. We hadn’t even had the chance to get the 200 pages of application papers out of our bag! “People your age do not retire in our country.” was the next reply. More blinking from us. Trust me when I say that nowhere in the application forms or instructions is there any mention of a minimum retirement age. We did the only thing we could think of – we proceeded to present our application as if the last 2 minutes had not occurred. Our paperwork was dutifully checked, we had a couple mistakes that would require us to send in more papers later.
The most amazing thing happened next. While she was working through the papers we began to make small talk with her and soon enough she was telling us about her trip to the grand canyon from last month and how much we’d love Granada. In the end she accepted our applications, applied the official stamp and told us we did need more paperwork but that we could mail it to her and we didn’t have to return to the embassy to submit it. She went so far as to tell us how to connect to her on the phone and talk our way past the polite but firm embassy people that answer the phone (remember the appointment snafu and the polite stonewall) when we had questions or completed paperwork.
With this under our belts, next up is renting a place to live, piece of cake to do during August in southern Spain…