Non EU Citizen’s cars are subject to sealing

Non-EU citizens, such as Americans and Canadians, are still subject to the sealing requirement if they wish to keep their foreign-registered cars permanently in Spain.

It works like this:

If you decide to stay in Spain after your six-month period is up, and you do not wish to drive your car out of the country, you can ask the Spanish customs officials to “seal” the car for you until you wish to remove it.

To have your car sealed, orprecintudo, you notify the customs officials, athzana. They in turn notify the Guardia Civil, who will come, fill out the forms, and put some strips of tape across the steering wheel of the car, designed to ensure that you do not use it. The process is not expensive.

Then you are ready to depart with the car, contact the customs office again and they will unseal the car.

You can then use the car six months, have it sealed until the end of the year, and use it again for the first six months of the following year. This sealing provision is useful for people who wish to keep their foreign-registered car in Spain all year round, but who only operate the car during their visits here.

Further, if you are not an EU citizen, you are required to have the car sealed if you leave it in Spain for more than two months while you yourself are absent. This sealing procedure applies only to non-EU citizens.

This is all very well, you say, for a tourist or a reguJar visitor, hut I intend to take up full-time residence in Spain, and I want to know if I can keep my foreign-registered car with me and use it on Spanish roads.

No, you can’t. An official resident of Spain must operate a ctir on full and normal Spanish registration. There is no way around this. After all, a Spaniard living and working in the UK would not be allowed to keep his Spanish-registered car forever, either.