Apostilles, legalisation and sworn translations: getting Spain's paperwork right from any country

A Spain visa file is mostly foreign paper. A police certificate from the country you live in now, another from the country you left four years ago, a marriage certificate, a bank letter, a company document. Every one of them has to land on a Spanish desk in a state an official there can accept: proven genuine, and readable in Spanish.

That is what apostilles, legalisation and sworn translations are for. It is also where the avoidable delays live, because each of those steps happens somewhere else, on someone else's schedule.

Key takeawaysLink to this section#

• Each foreign public document goes through three stages: it gets issued, it gets authenticated, and it gets translated by a sworn translator.
• Authentication means an apostille if your country is party to the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961, and consular legalisation if it is not.
• The translation must be into Spanish, by a translator authorised by Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAEC). A bilingual friend or a translation agency's own certificate is not the same thing.
• Your criminal-record certificate has a different name and a different issuer in every country. What Spain asks for does not change; the document that satisfies it does.
• Certificates age. Get the criminal-record and medical certificates within 90 days of filing, and get them last rather than first.
• The Non-Lucrative Visa wants criminal-record certificates from every country you lived in over the past five years. The Digital Nomad Visa wants the last two, plus a signed declaration covering five.

What does Spain actually want from a foreign document?Link to this section#

Three things, in this order: the document itself, proof that the signature on it is real, and a Spanish version of both. That applies to the public documents in a file rather than to every page of it, and the Non-Lucrative Visa document list shows which items those are for that visa.

The middle step is the one people skip. A civil servant in Madrid has no way of knowing whether the signature of an officer at the Registro Nacional de Reincidencia in Buenos Aires, or a records clerk in Lagos, is genuine. So Spain does not ask them to judge. It asks the issuing country to vouch for its own official, either with an apostille or through consular legalisation, and then asks for the whole thing in Spanish. The Non-Lucrative document sheets say it in a line: criminal-record certificates must be apostilled or legalised and carry a sworn Spanish translation (Ministry of Inclusion, Non-Lucrative residence sheet). The teleworker checklist says the same for foreign public documents generally (UGE documentation checklist).

Not everything gets the full treatment. The rule bites on public documents, the ones an authority issues about you: criminal records, birth and marriage certificates, a company's registry certificate. The same UGE checklist accepts a plain translation of a CV, which tells you where the line sits: a document you wrote about yourself is not a document a state issued about you. Your passport is a third case again, copied rather than authenticated. The step-by-step application guide puts the whole set in filing order.

If family is coming with you, their papers go through the same three stages, which roughly doubles the work. The consular teleworker sheet asks for the relationship certificates (marriage, birth, civil union) apostilled like everything else, and for evidence of dependence where an adult child or a parent is on the application (Santiago de Chile, teleworker visa requirements). Degree certificates land here too on the Digital Nomad route, where a qualification is one of the two accepted ways to show you are equipped for the work you do remotely. The test is the same each time: did a foreign authority issue this about you, or did you write it yourself?

Apostille or legalisation, and which one is my country?Link to this section#

You need an apostille if your country is party to the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961, and consular legalisation if it is not. Spain applies the Ministry of Justice's list of signatory states, so that list is the one that decides your answer, whatever another site says.

An apostille is one certificate, attached in the country the document came from, and Spain takes it at face value. Legalisation is the older route and a longer one: the document is certified inside its own country and then presented to the Spanish consulate there, so the last stamp in the chain is Spain's own. Which office issues which stamp along the way is a matter of local law, and none of the Spanish checklists set that chain out step by step, so the Spanish consulate covering the issuing country is who to ask.

The table below is the one we keep. It gives the certificate each country issues, how that certificate gets authenticated, and whether a certificate of coverage is available in place of registering with Spanish Social Security. Every row carries the date we last read the issuing authority's own page.

It answers two separate questions. The third column decides your route: of the fifteen countries here, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates take consular legalisation, and everywhere else on the list takes an apostille. The second column tells you what to actually ask for, because "criminal record certificate" is not what the issuing authority calls it at home.

If your country is not on the list, nothing about the requirement changes. Check the Ministry of Justice list for your answer on apostille or legalisation, assume legalisation until you have confirmed otherwise, and ask the consulate that covers you which certificate it wants. That is what the last row of the table tells you to do. What changes between countries is the certificate's local name and who issues it, and that is all that changes.

What is a sworn translation, and who is allowed to make one?Link to this section#

A sworn translation is a translation into Spanish made, signed and stamped by a translator authorised by Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The teleworker instruction and the UGE checklist both name that authorisation specifically, and the Non-Lucrative consular sheets ask for a sworn translation of the criminal-record and medical certificates. You can check the authorisation before you pay for it: the Ministry's Language Interpretation Office publishes the list of everyone it has appointed, with a search tool you can put a name into. Translators for Catalan, Galician and Basque are appointed by their own regional governments instead, so an absence from this particular list is not always a problem.

Several near misses cost people an appointment. A translation by a fluent friend does not qualify. Neither does an agency's certificate of accuracy on its own letterhead, however official it looks. A notarised translation fails for a subtler reason: the notary is attesting to a signature, not to the translator's authorisation.

What our sources do not settle is whether a translation made abroad by a translator certified under that country's rules is accepted. The requirement as written names MAEC authorisation, so a MAEC-authorised translator is the path that works everywhere, and it is the one we use. If someone offers you a cheaper local option, ask the consulate before you pay for it rather than after.

The translation covers the document. Our practice, and this is our own working rule rather than anything published, is to have the apostille translated along with it, because it is a foreign-language certificate stapled to a foreign-language document, and a translation that stops short of it invites a question at the counter.

How fresh do the certificates have to be?Link to this section#

Fresh enough varies by consulate, which is why we work to 90 days. The Casablanca Non-Lucrative sheet sets a maximum age of three months for both the criminal-record certificate and the medical certificate (requirements sheet). New York is more generous on one and stricter on the other: it accepts a certificate up to six months old, and from US residents it accepts only the FBI's (New York consulate, Non-Lucrative visa). Ninety days satisfies every consulate we have checked.

For a Digital Nomad application filed inside Spain, neither the joint instruction nor the UGE checklist sets a freshness window at all. That is not permission to file a two-year-old certificate. It means nobody has published the limit, and the same 90-day habit costs you nothing.

The medical certificate follows the criminal record here. Spain's immigration regulation requires proof that you carry none of the diseases with serious public-health consequences under the 2005 International Health Regulations (RD 1155/2024); the three-month age limit on it is the consulate's rule rather than the regulation's.

What is my criminal-record certificate called, and how far back does it go?Link to this section#

How far back the certificate has to reach is set by Spanish law, and it differs by visa. For the Non-Lucrative Visa you need certificates from every country you have lived in during the previous five years, which is written into the regulation itself, at article 38.e of RD 1155/2024. For the Digital Nomad Visa the window is the last two years, plus a signed declaration that you have no criminal record over five (Ley 14/2013, article 62.3.c). The Digital Nomad route drops the certificate requirement altogether if you already hold a Spanish residence or stay authorisation of more than six months.

Two years abroad in the middle of that window means two certificates, each authenticated in the country that issued it, each translated. People forget the country they left, and in our experience that is a common reason a file has to be rebuilt after it was already complete.

The names in the table are worth reading before you start searching. In the United States it is the FBI's Identity History Summary, the document people call a rap sheet, and the New York consulate accepts nothing else from US residents. In the United Kingdom it is the ACRO Police Certificate. In Brazil, the Certidão de Antecedentes Criminais from the Polícia Federal. In the Philippines, the NBI Clearance. In Türkiye, the Adli Sicil Kaydı, which comes through the e-Devlet portal. Every issuer in that table is a national authority, which is why a state or provincial police check is usually the wrong document even where it is the easy one to get.

In what order should I do all of this?Link to this section#

Authenticate before you translate, and collect the documents that age last.

1. List the countries. Five years back for the Non-Lucrative Visa, two for the Digital Nomad Visa. Every country you actually lived in, not only the one on your current address.
2. Start the slow documents that do not expire. Company registry certificates, degree copies, insurance, proof of address, income evidence. These take weeks and nothing about them goes stale.
3. Request the criminal-record certificates about 90 days before you expect to file. Some issue in days, some in weeks. The Non-Lucrative medical certificate goes in the same slot.
4. Authenticate each foreign public document in the country that issued it. Apostille or legalisation, decided by the Ministry of Justice list, not by which is easier to arrange.
5. Send the finished, authenticated documents to a sworn translator.
6. File, with the originals and the translations together.

Steps four and five in that order matter more than they look. In our experience, the file that has to be redone is almost always the one where the apostille arrived after the translation was already paid for, and the translation therefore covers a document that has since had a page added to it.

None of it is fast, and once a document leaves your hands the speed belongs to someone else. Two to six weeks for the document-gathering phase is our own estimate, and it moves with how many countries you are collecting from. If you are planning around it, the pre-departure checklist sets these steps against everything else that has to happen before you fly.

What actually goes wrong?Link to this section#

Most of the files we are asked to repair failed in one of five ways.

The certificate expires while the rest of the file is being assembled, because it was the first thing collected instead of the last. A regional police check gets submitted where the national certificate was required. A translation turns out to be an agency's own certification rather than a sworn one, which is discovered at the counter. A country in the five-year window is missed, usually one where the applicant spent under a year. And an apostille is assumed to exist in a country that is not party to the Convention, which sends the whole document back to the start of the legalisation chain with the appointment date already fixed.

Every one of those is a scheduling failure rather than a legal one, which is the good news: nothing there disqualifies anybody. It is why we start a file with the country list and the calendar rather than with the forms.

If you are looking at a document and cannot tell which of these steps it needs, tell us what it is and where it was issued and we will tell you what it takes. Asking costs you an email and commits you to nothing.