Different

-
Cartagena is in the Region of Murcia. Lots of Britons, lots of EU citizens, live in Murcia. Alicante province has even more Britons, even more EU citizens.

Driving licences all over the EU all have a very similar design. It's dead easy to swap a British, or Belgian or Dutch driving licence for a Spanish one but lots of Britons (I'm going to stop adding in other European countries now but I'm sure you've grasped the point) prefer the home grown product. So, if by the simple device of getting a  friend or relative in the UK to allow you to use their address you can hang on to a driving licence made in Swansea that's what lots of us prefer to do.

How legal a non Spanish driving licence is for an EU citizen resident in Spain has been a perennial bar room topic for years. I had my own understanding of the regs around driving licences and I sent my licence to be changed to a Spanish one last July just before I'd been officially resident for five years. The replacement still hasn't arived but that's a different story.

Laws change all the time in every country and public awareness of those changes is not always high. That's the case even when the changes and the publicity about them are available in your native language. In Spain where most Brits don't get their news from the Spanish media or even Spanish sources two things happen. People either know nothing about the changes or, more usually, several different interpretations of the changes start to circulate.

In our home town in Alicante we are lucky to have a much more relaible source than most. Clive wearing his UCL hat. Clive told us about changes to the driving licence requirements. Resident Brits were offered basically two options. Change our UK licence for a Spanish one or register our UK licence so that the Spanish authorities could find (and fine) us. The cut off date for the changes was 9 December.

Some of our friends here recently registered their UK licences with the traffic people in Alicante without too much bother. Maggie thought she would do the same today but she chose to use the traffic office here in Cartagena. Apparently she caused confusion and consternation amongst the workers behind the counter. They vaguely knew about registering EU licences but they weren't quite sure how so they took all the paperwork that Maggie proffered plus her licence and said they'd give her a call when they had some news back from Madrid.

It seems it's not just the Brits who get their legal updates in a haphazard and individual way.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A bit bigger than 12 gauge

-
Image
If you ever feel the need to launch armour piercing shells weighing 885kg and loaded with 18 kilos of TNT a little over 35 kilometres out to sea then I know where you can find exactly the device to do it. 885kg by the way is about the weight of the current Fiat 500 car. Just down the coast from us at Azohía there is an abandoned, but well maintained, fortress that houses two rather fearsome looking cannons. The fortress was constructed between 1928 and 1936. The guns themselves were built by Vickers. Their barrels are 17 metres long with a calibre of 38cm. Not quite wide enough to launch that Fiat but pretty big nonetheless. You're going to need 20 pals to help you fire each gun and you'll probably need to fill in some official paperwork, this being Spain, but it would make you the envy of anyone who thought they were pretty cool because they owned a pair of Purdeys. Fabulous location too. Nice bit of the coast.
Read more

Shopping

-
Image
Closing in on 30 years ago now I went to a Spanish class in Peterborough with a teacher called John Richardson. On the first night he asked us why we wanted to learn Spanish. I said that I wanted to be able to buy a beer. He lied to me and said that would be easy. I still have trouble getting a beer. Other people in the group said that they wanted to learn the language because they had just bought a house in Torrevieja and wanted to be able to talk to their neighbours. I distinctly remember John saying that it seemed that half of Peterborough had a house in Torrevieja. So there have been Britons in Torrevieja for over 30 years and it shows. We went there to buy specs. We went to Specsavers because I had heard that they were cheap. From the initial phone call to the final fitting everything was transacted in English and the only Spaniard I encountered (to my knowledge) in the whole process was the optician. Specsavers is in a shopping centre and the principal language throughout the...
Read more

Second class citizens

-
Image
We have house guests at the moment - some of Maggie's family and their lovers. Generally all we've done is to walk, eat and drink with the occasional museum stop to imitate cultural longing. Yesterday we boarded the Tourist Boat for a gentle tootle around the harbour. It's a while since I've been on the boat so I was a bit surprised when there was no recorded "to the left the such and such fort and to the right the old fisherman's quay" - commentary. It used to come first in Spanish and then in English but now all is silence. Anyway we stopped at Fuerte de la Navidad - Christmas Fort. Non Spanish speakers were directed one way and Spanish speakers another. We got to see an English language film extolling the virtues of Cartagena and then we were left to stroll the fort at leisure. As we walked and nosed I realised that the Spanish speakers were getting a detailed introduction to the fort. I joined in. Interesting stuff I thought. Lots about the de...
Read more