At long last, I managed to get my Residencia.

The Residencia is a credit card sized plastic card, with a photo and fingerprint, and address. It is the equivalent of the identity card which the Spanish carry, but for foreigners. In Spain, as in many other countries, it is a legal requirement to carry your identity documents, and it is widely used - for example, when you want to pay for something using a credit card.

Up till now, I haven’t needed one. I have tax status here (lucky me!) which means that I can pay tax in Spain, and for the last few years, that has been all that I need. But I am obliged to carry my passport, which is bigger. Better to carry a credit card around, easier on the pockets, etc.

So when it got round to time to renew my wifes residencia, after five years, I decided to bite the bullet. All you need to do is fill in a couple of forms, provide photos, and make a payment. Simple. Except that I lost count of the number of visits to the police station in Malaga. Four or five. Luckily, the queue isn’t huge for Europeans - the one for non-Europeans stretches out of the door and down the street. But there is no reasons why it should take so many trips. After handing in all our papers, we were told to come back when they were verified, which takes a few weeks, and when we went back, we were given a form to make the payment at the bank - about six Euros. So you trot off to the bank, then another queue to show that you have paid. Of course, there are a dozen ways to simplify this, but the system here is that, whatever you want - or are required to have - you have to queue. The mentality seems to be, that no-one works, and everyone has time to visit these offices three or four times. A recent visit to the Social Security payments office took three trips, as nothing can be done by post. Also, at one point, we were told that we had to go to a different office for our residencia. There is a sign on the wall in the police station, pointing out that a new office is opening in November (it doesn’t say, but it was November 2005!), and at one point we were told that our documents “might” be in the other office, which involved queuing right outside the office, and then being told that the papers weren’t there, and that we had to go back to the original office.

But it’s all sorted out now, and for 5 years we are covered. And you can guarantee that by the time we need to renew, there will be another simple - it changed a lot in the last five years. But I’ll bet that it will still take 18 months to do…