Foreign registration plates in Spain

Can you take your present car with you and keep it in Spain on its UK (or other European country) registration plates?

Let's suppose that you already own a car with British or German registration plates. If you are a tourist in Spain, you can operate such a car for six months in a calendar year with no formalities beyond the presentaion at the border of your driving licence, car registration and insurance certificate. That is, if anyone bothers to stop you at the frontier.

You can keep your foreign-registered car in Spain permanently, but you will have to garage it for six months of each year. You can only drive it on Spanish roads for six months.

With Spain's entry into the EU, the international insurance certificate, or so-called "green card", is no longer necessary, but you may find that your individual policy gives only minimum coverage when you are outside your country without it, so check to be sure.

Your driving licence from your home country will be acceptable for the first six months of your stay in Spain, though authorities recommend that you have either an international driving licence or an official translation of your licence, which you can get from the Spanish consulate in your home country.

Neither the translation nor the international licence is absolutely necessary if you are an EU citizen.

If you own a holiday home in Spain which you visit at Christmas time and in the summer, you can freely operate your foreign-registered car, using your foreign driving licence, with no further problems, as long as you total visits to Spain don't pass six months in any calendar year. The six months need not be continuous. It could be three visits of two months each, for example.

Because this period lies in a calendar year, it has this peculiarity: if the visitor enters Spain after June 30th, he can keep and operate his foreign registered car for the last six months of that year, and the first six months of the following year.

The six-month period is based on the stay of the person himself in the country, rather than on the length of stay of the car. That is, a European who stays in Spain for four months without a car, then decides to return to his home coutnry and bring his car back with him, can only operate the car in Spain for another two months. He can keep it in Spain but he can't legally drive it.

So how do they know whether or not you are driving the car? Good quesiton. For European Union citizens, there really is no effective way to know whether the car is being driven or not. They formerly were required to have the car officially "sealed" for six monhth of each year, but EU citizens no longer have to do this.

If you go to the trouble of obtaining exit and entry stamps in your passport, you will have definite proof of the length of your stay.

Article from "You & the Law in Spain" by David Searl.