move to barcelona

How I did it: We are originally from the US and we were living in New Zealand for 6 years while I worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong.

We started by applying for residency. We hired a law firm in Marbella who did the hard work and sent us the documents and forms and told us what we had to do. They also baysat the forms as they went through the Spanish beauracracy. It took 1.5 years to do this and they charged us 3000 Euros.

Once our residency papers came through we had to go stay in Sydney Australia for three weeks to sign and wait for another approval at the Spanish embassy there.

Once that came through we actually moved to Barcelona. All of our belongings were on a cargo ship which took 6 weeks to arrive. When it did arrive we weren't ready for it as we were still looking for a piso to buy and we had to keep it stored at the docks.
We rented rooms and apartments until we found a piso in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona that we fell in love with and then went into the long process of buying it.

It took 3 months to purchase but once we moved in and got our belongings out of storage we sat that and were astonished that we actually did it.

We have been living here for 2.5 years now and couldn't be happier.

I forgot to mention that we also brought our two dogs from New Zealand to Barcelona just to complicate matters even further.

Lessons & tips: If anyone needs any specific information on the process required to move to Spain just let me know.

Jan 24, 2009, 08:34AM PST | 8 comments | 4 cheers