I got my green NIE. I got lucky.

Spain's big, beautiful, messed up immigration bureaucracy, plus: the saga of my Spanish driver's license

There I was in the police station in Vila Nova i la Geltrú, an hour’s train ride west from Barcelona. Me and around maybe 50 people, of every age and family make-up, speaking at least a dozen languages, eyes nervously fixed on the screen as it counted the numbers down toward their ticket, and all waiting our turn for a chance at the Spanish dream.

Or as it’s known colloquially: the Green NIE.

There is a lot of complaining to be done about the Spanish immigration bureaucracy. There is almost a snowball effect—we’ve heard it’s terrible, so we fit what happens into our expectations that it will be terrible, and when events confirm our expectations, we add to the chorus of complaining.

It is almost fashionable, especially among digital nomads. They complain about the insensible rules, the difficulty in getting appointments, the long waits.

But sitting there in the police station in Vilanova, surrounded by people old and young, in burkas and board shorts, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Arab, European, and half a dozen other nationalities I couldn’t begin to guess at—and me, the tall, white American climber.

I found it touching.

So let me start with the obvious thing that is never said enough: here is a country in Europe, at peace, educated, kind, with an incredibly high standard of living, an accessible language, excellent healthcare, beautiful cities, and boundless nature. This country is letting you in.

We should all be so lucky.

But yes, you have to jump through hoops. Sometimes maddening ones.

But let’s go back. The pursuit of my own so-called Green NIE arguably started back in the exam room of the Dirección General De Tráfico, or DGT, the Spanish transportation department, which is in charge of issuing driver’s licenses.

And actually, it started before that. With a traffic stop.

I. The drunk driving checkpoint (a recap)

It was a Sunday morning in January and I was on my way climbing. I’d been living in Spain for just over six months and I had blessedly avoided many of the bureaucratic headaches beset by other long-term residents.

That was due mostly to the fact that I have a German passport, which means I didn’t need to mess around with digital nomad visas or anything like that.

I also already had a NIE (Número de Identificación de Extranjero, and pronounced “nee-yah”), a kind of tax ID number that allows foreigners to do business in the country. Specifically, I had what is known as a “White NIE,” which I had gotten a year earlier in preparation for buying an old stone fixer-upper in Cornudella de Montsant.

Effectively, I had been living in Spain as a German citizen/property investor: no visa, but with a tax ID number.

Getting stopped by Barcelona police changed all this.

It was a routine drunk driving checkpoint, set up to catch revelers who had been partying the night before. The breathalyzer they gave me came back negative of course (we climbers don’t typically party through the night, at least not when we’re climbing the next day).

The problem was with my U.S. driver’s license.

You can read the entire story of that Sunday morning in January, but the short of it was this: if you are considered to be living in Spain for more than six months, you need to get a Spanish driver’s license if you want to drive.

The definition of living in Spain is straightforward—you are considered to be living here if you’ve been here for six months out of the year. Yet the criteria by which authorities verify that is not at all clear.

In the case of Barcelona traffic police, they looked up my NIE, which is connected to the registration on my van. They told me I must have been living here for more than six months because I had received the NIE over a year earlier.

I had indeed been living in Barcelona for more than six months, but that had nothing to do with when I got my NIE. I had gotten the NIE at the Spanish embassy in Washington D.C. in order to make an offer on the property. It was a white piece of paper (thus “White NIE”), which I had printed out from the email sent to me by the embassy.

Any investor almost anywhere in the world can get a White NIE, and, as would become extremely relevant later, it really has little or nothing to do with being a resident of Spain.

II. On reciprocity agreements

The police ticketed me €250 euros and told me I was not allowed to drive again until I got a Spanish driver’s license.

For residents from a country with a reciprocity agreement with Spain, this is relatively easy. Spain recognizes your license as valid, and vice versa. You show up at an office, they give you a Spain license and take your old one. The list of countries with reciprocity agreements includes the entire E.U., plus about 30 other countries, most of them Spanish speaking in Central or South America.

The full list is on the DGT website. The United States is not on it.

To be fair, the U.S. has 50 different licensing agencies, one for each state, each state has slightly different requirements. A country could be forgiven for not bothering, though some countries have managed to make agreements with individual U.S. states.

Faced with the prospect of being unable to drive to the country, to my investment property, or to any climbing crag anywhere, I started trying to work the system.

Could my German citizenship help? Germany has a reciprocity agreement with 28 U.S. states to exchange driver’s licenses. But unfortunately, New Hampshire isn’t on it.

Could I switch my driver’s license to a different state, for example New Mexico, where I’m from originally, and then switch it to a German license? No—Germany thought of that, and so requires that any license be held for at least two years before exchanging.

Other attempts to circumvent the system ran up against similar barriers. In the end, it became clear that actually going through the normal Spanish process to get a new driver’s license would itself be the simplest solution.

Thus was I launched into the infamous bureaucracy of the Dirección General De Tráfico, the DGT.

III. The all-but-broken, “very bad” DGT process

On its face, the process is relatively simple:

1. Pass a basic medical exam proving fitness to drive

2. Pass a written exam (the “theoretical”)

3. Pass the driving test (the “practical”)

The problem is with the appointments.

On the DGT’s website, it is clear to state that the cost to register for and take the written exam is free. In theory, yes. In practice? The online system for registering to take the test seems to have been taken over by some kind of Spanish Driving School Cartel.

Appointments are never available.

I checked the Facebook groups. I searched the blogs and Reddit. I pinged friends in the know. “The schools operate like a mafia,” went one representative complaint. The driving schools (or some intermediary for them) appear to either have programmed bots to suck up all the appointments as soon as they become available, or they are getting contacts on the inside to give them blocks of appointments for their students ahead of the general public.

Either way, the public seems to be shut out of the process.

There is a lot of hand-wringing in Spain about the hypocrisy of a supposedly generous social welfare state when combined with a nearly impossible system for getting appointments to actually access certain services. In 2019, one newspaper reported the DGT was on the “verge of collapse.” There weren’t enough staff. Phone calls to the offices were never answered. Appointments were next to impossible to get.

During the pandemic, Spain introduced an online system that was supposed to ameliorate the situation—but so far it only appears to have brought the system from “impossible” to merely “very bad.”

A recent study by a third party found that out of 1,800 attempts to get various appointments at the DGT, the requester was successful only a third of the time. But the successful appointments were often 40 days out, or up to 200 kilometers away from where they lived.

According to the anecdotes online, Barcelona is one of the most difficult places to get an appointment. It has large immigrant and expat populations competing with locals, all trying for the same thing. I tried dozens of times over the course of a week to get an appointment to take the practical test and had absolutely no success.

The only solution, if you don’t want to bang your head against the wall, seems to be to hire one of Spain’s many driving schools to handle everything for you.

Thus the accusations of being a kind of mafia.

IV. 14,000 possible questions

I bit the bullet and signed up with a school.

I paid them an egregious amount of money for “matriculation,” and later for the “tramite,” i.e. for them to send my paperwork to the DGT and get me an appointment to take the theoretical exam. They gave me a textbook, access to their online practice test system, and sent me on my way to study.

The total cost came to about €550.

This, it should be noted, was on the cheap side—probably because the school I chose doesn’t speak or teach in English. For that, you need to pay more. One report estimates the total all-in cost is between €700 and €2,000, depending on where you live and how much time you need for driving classes.

This is a huge investment for your average Spanish citizen.

Could I have done it all for less? Probably, yes. I could have designed a bot to check the DGT website for me at all hours of the morning and night and ping me when an appointment was released. Or, I could have used much cheaper standalone test prep apps. In fact, the DGT has a free, online test system—though it started malfunctioning a few weeks before my test date, only giving me the three same tests over and over.

In fact, there are 14,000 potential questions one might encounter on the theory test. Of those, you’ll get 30 on the test, and you fail if you get more than three wrong.

You can take it in English, but that comes with its own landmines. The translations are often bad, or, worse, grammatically misleading. Many questions are intentionally designed to throw you off. Meanwhile, to get your “B” license, the one to drive a car, for some reason you also have to know arcane details on everything from the circumstances in which the driver of a public emergency vehicle is required to wear a seatbelt, to the proper method for herding animals on the side of a public road.

The questions get mind-numbing very fast. Does a bus carrying passengers have priority over a vehicle with a trailer when the two enter a narrow stretch with no priority sign? Which vehicles are allowed to use a road opened in the opposite direction of normal traffic for the purposes of roadworks vs. in order to increase normal traffic flow? Is stopping a vehicle to comply with any regulatory requirement considered to be A., a standstill, B., parking, or C., a stop?

There are thousands of these kind of weird, esoteric, basically ridiculous questions. Here was one of my favorites:

Studying became an exercise in staving off crushing boredom. I established a system of rewards: after five practice tests, I would get a croissant. If I could extend studying into the afternoon, I’d add a beer.

Midway through my studying, I made an important cognitive switch. Instead of letting wrong answers give me anxiety that I would fail the test, I started being grateful for new questions I didn’t know the answer to. Every new question meant one less way to be surprised on the exam day—so the more the new questions the better.

In the end, I memorized A LOT. I took hundreds of practice tests. I made cheat sheets to help memorize the stuff I was routinely getting wrong.

V. My theoretical exam date disaster

On May 15th, I showed up at the DGT office in Barcelona at 9 in the morning for my 9:20am test appointment, on the second floor of a large, nondescript office building. I was in the heart of Spanish bureaucracy.

I sat quietly in a large waiting room full of people, most of them much younger than me, reviewing my cheat sheets. As instructed by the owner of the driving school, I had with me my NIE and my passport.

The doors opened. A man instructed us in Spanish to get our identification out. I lined up. I got to the man. I handed him my German passport and the white piece of paper with my NIE number on it. He looked at it, shook his head.

Where is your residency card? he asked.

What residency card?

Your NIE. Your green NIE.

This is my NIE. This is the original, I said.

The director came over. I was pulled out of line. The rest of the dozens there to take the test started filing past me and taking their seats around the large, neon-lit exam room.

In fact, I knew my NIE wasn’t the permanent type, but nor did I know that I would need it here. What I had was my “padrón,” or empadronamiento, a residency document that showed I lived in Barcelona. I had needed it for the tramite for the school to get the test date appointment in the first place.

I have my residency! I told the guy in the line, my heart beating, my Spanish kicking in to full speed. I have my empadronamiento. I am a resident. I live here.

Things moved fast. I called the owner of my driving school. I put him on speaker. I followed them in Spanish. I wasn’t allowed to take the test without a green residency card. But how did I get the test date in the first place? It was a mistake, said the director. I shouldn’t have been allowed to register in the first place. I needed the residency card. The padrón wasn’t good enough.

The director took the white piece of paper with my NIE, held it up, and explained: this does not mean you live in Spain. Anyone can get this. It does not mean you’re a resident.

The Barcelona police had told me I was a resident because of the NIE. Yet here was a DGT official saying the NIE in no way meant I was a resident.

The DGT was right. I knew it.

I’d been avoiding official residency for a long time, essentially skating by on my German passport.

The fix was in. I couldn’t get a driver’s license unless I got a residency card.

I had more bureaucracy to navigate.

VI. The Green NIE

I was pissed.

Mostly at the driving school.

I’d paid hundreds of euros for them to handle the “process,” and they’d essentially flubbed the one job. They had told me I needed a NIE. That was wrong. I needed more than a NIE—I needed a green residency card.

Here’s where things get complicated.

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. It’d been four months since getting pulled over by Barcelona police. Four months unable to drive. Four months with a Fiat Doblo parked in the garage under the Mercat de Sant Antoni that I could not myself drive (I occasionally relied on the goodwill of others to drive it to go climbing).

I was also leaving for the U.S. in July, and I wanted to get the driver’s license before I left.

But first I had to figure out what I actually needed to apply for. The NIE, I already had. But the NIE is essentially just a number. What I needed was called the “Certificado de Registro UE,” a residency card for E.U. citizens. It’s a green card with your NIE number printed on it, with an official seal, and between it and the TIE (which is for non-E.U. nationals), it is the only thing bestowing actual residency status for foreigners.

Thus commenced another flurry of research to make sure I understood the requirements.

I texted friends. I again went to the Reddit threads and the Facebook groups. I posted to one, Autónom@s & self-employed in Spain, and received excellent, informed feedback on my situation (German citizen, U.S. driver’s license, self-employed). I got connected to an immigration lawyer who generously answered questions during a phone call, and several more via text.

At the end of the day, I decided to go for the “Sufficient Resources” category, meaning I only had to show that I had purchased private health insurance and had enough money in the bank for one year of living expenses. Both of these requirements ensure that I am not a drain on the Spanish welfare system.

The problem, as with the DGT, is in getting the appointment.

I went to the page on the Spanish government website and tried. Nothing.

I talked to the lawyer again: she could get me a “black market” appointment for €40 euros, but she discouraged people from doing that, as it only encouraged a broken system. I switched my province on the appointment page from Barcelona to Tarragona, where in theory I could apply if I changed my padrón. There was one appointment available, about a week away, in a tiny village called Tortosa.

In order to do that, I would have to change my padrón from Barcelona to Cornudella de Montsant in Tarragona, where I owned the investment property. To do that I would need to show up at town hall there, then wait at least a few days for them to process the paperwork.

And I still couldn’t drive.

Getting to Cornudella would mean two hours on a train to Reus, then a 45-minute bus. Then a wait of at least a few days for the padrón. To Tortosa, it would be three hours on a train leaving at 5:30am from Barcelona.

It could all be done, but—we were talking at least a week consumed by taking various trains and buses around Catalunya. So I could get the residency card. So I could take the driving test. So I could get a driver’s license.

And then: fortune smiled upon me.

VII. I get lucky

The week after the driving exam disaster, my son’s mom happened to visit Barcelona. I let her stay in the apartment while I went to Vila Nova i la Geltrú, an hour west, to housesit.

It was a Monday, and there was yet another national holiday, this one for Pentacost. At around 8:30pm, I got back to the apartment where I was staying, opened a beer, and decided again to check the website for the NIE appointments. This time, unlike the dozens of other times I’d tried, two appointment times showed up: one of them in Vilanova, a ten-minute walk from where I was staying. It was for 12 noon the next day.

I honestly could not believe my luck.

The next morning, I went to a print shop and printed out everything I needed: proof of health insurance (I’d bought it for both my son and I when we first arrived), bank statements, and the application for the Certificado de Registro. Next, I went to a local bank to pay the fee for the application—I got the official receipt and added it to my packet of material. I had everything I needed.

When I finally sat in the waiting room of the police station in Vilanova, my anxiety around the whole bureaucratic mess finally started to subside. I looked around at the united nations of applicants waiting patiently. A deep sense of gratitude started to come over me.

I already had many privileges as an E.U. citizen (not to mention a U.S. citizen), but Spain’s generosity extended to people from countries all over the world. They had slightly different paperwork in their own file folders, but at the end of the day we were all here for the same thing—permission to live here, as opposed to wherever it was we came from.

I thought of a post I’d read recently: Immigration as Entrepreneurship. At first, the two groups, immigrants and entrepreneurs, might seem radically different. But in the end, writes

Monica Nastase

, immigrants and entrepreneurs share many characteristics:

An entrepreneur sets up a business and takes financial risks in the hope of profit. 

An expat sets up a new life project and takes personal and financial risks in the hope of a better (different, more exciting, calmer, richer, simpler, etc.) life. 

Both groups need discipline, confidence, and flexibility. Both need a curious mind.

Then I thought of a meme from Amy Chua about how every foreign accent represents an act of bravery. Someone who left their country for another, endeavored to learn the language, and make a new life.

I was in a room full of brave people.

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VIII. Coda

In the end, I got my Green NIE at the police station in Vilanova i la Geltrú. I got another exam date, and I recently passed the theory test—only one question wrong. My driving test is scheduled for a few weeks from now. Barcelona, with its heavy traffic and mix of street environments is one of the most difficult places to pass the test, so I still have some way to go.

More to come. But in the mean time: thank you to Spain for having me.