BRITONS in Spain face anger and frustration as delays soar in securing vital residency paperwork needed to live legally in the country.

Authorities have warned of waiting lists of up to 14 weeks as bots snap up appointments for TIE cards, the residency permits required for all British nationals since Brexit.

Staff shortages and soaring demand are also fuelling the growing backlog, authorities added.

TIE cards are biometric residency permits proving a foreign national’s legal right to live in Spain, and they are mandatory for all non-EU nationals living in the country for more than 180 days.

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They contain the holder’s photo, fingerprints, residency number and immigration status, and are needed for everything from opening bank accounts to accessing healthcare and signing rental contracts.

Applications are made at designated police stations and immigration offices across Spain, but demand for appointments has surged in major cities since post-Brexit residency rules came into force.

In Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, waits are stretching between eight and 14 weeks, officials said.

In smaller cities and less-populated provinces, appointments can still be secured within one to three weeks.

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Brits moving to Spain are normally required to apply for a TIE card within 30 days of arrival.

If no appointments are available within that period because of mounting delays, applicants can simply book the earliest slot they can find, officials said.

If an applicant needs to travel outside Spain while their TIE card is delayed, they must apply for a ‘return authorisation’ (autorizacion de regreso) at a local police station.

Their fingerprint receipt, known in Spanish as a resguardo, will be required for the process.

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The warning comes after Spain’s central government approved a controversial scheme set to grant legal status to around half a million migrants.

Applications for the programme, which opened on April 16 and are due to close on June 30, have sparked huge queues outside immigration offices across Spain.

Applicants have been seen sleeping rough in a desperate bid to secure appointments, while violence erupted in Murcia last month as tensions boiled over among queuing migrants.

In Madrid, migrants were filmed scaling the walls of The Gambia’s embassy in late April in a frantic attempt to bypass queues and secure paperwork for citizenship applications.

The scenes prompted Spain’s police union, JUPOL, to warn of the ‘massive pressure’ being placed on local law enforcement.

Ibon Dominguez, spokesperson for JUPOL, said in April: “We are seeing public order issues, exactly as we predicted.

“There has been a complete lack of foresight and coordination. Local councils are overwhelmed because they haven’t been involved at all,” he added.

Authorities have not confirmed whether the delays in securing TIE appointments are directly linked to the regularisation scheme.

Spain’s Supreme Court said earlier this month it would consider suspending the controversial programme, with a decision expected tomorrow (Friday).
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A ROMAN bust of the goddess Venus dating back as much 2,000 years has been found during regeneration work at Alicante’s La Almadraba beach.

The bust is 22.22 centimetres tall and 19.78 centimetres wide and is typical of those placed on bases in Roman patrician houses.

Alicante’s Culture councillor, Nayma Beldjilali, described it as a find of ‘incalculable value’.

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Beldjilali said: “It is a Roman head of great artistic quality and in an excellent state of conservation that, according to experts probably represented Venus.”

“This could be one of the most important-ever discoveries of a Roman sculpture in Alicante province.”

The councillor explained that prior to regeneration work at Almadraba beach, an excavation was carried out ‘as it is an archaeological area, where a Roman villa has already been found’.

Beldjilali continued: “In the course excavations in a nearby area, this bust of white marble of great value was found, which must have been in the house of some prominent Roman citizen.”

Alicante’s head of Integral Heritage, Jose Manuel Perez Burgos, said: “The bust has a hairstyle of Hellenistic influence, with wavy hair gathered back with a parting in the middle following the model of representations of divinities such as the Greek Aphrodite or the Roman Venus”.

“In the absence of a more exhaustive report, both in style and context, the time frame would be the first and second centuries AD,” he continued.

The rule of Emperor Caesar Augustus saw a strong expansion of the borders of the Roman Empire which also brought about the Pax Romana and a period of great cultural interest.

The goddess Venus, and her Greek equivalent Aphrodite, was considered in the Empire as the mother of the Roman people and represented love, beauty and fertility.
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SPAIN is heading for its first scorcher weekend of the year as a brutal front of hot air moves up over the peninsula from Africa.

State weather agency AEMET has launched emergency weather alerts for Friday and the weekend as a record-breaking high-pressure ridge locks extreme heat over Andalucia and the Costa Blanca.

Maximum temperatures will rocket up to 15C above the seasonal average over the next seven days, marking a blistering and lightning-fast transition from an unusually cool start to May.

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Highs of 36C are expected on the Murcia coast over the weekend. Meteored

For expat hotspots along the Costa del Sol and Valencia Community, the weekend heat will feel like the height of summer, with temperatures predicted to reach mid-summer highs of between 30C and 38C.

The most extreme heat is expected to concentrate across southwestern Spain, prompting AEMET to place parts of Extremadura on warning for temperatures hitting 38C.

Compounding the misery for weekend residents, the eastern edge of this massive ‘heat dome’ is sucking up a significant wave of Saharan dust, according to the experts to Meteored.

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This airborne mud and calima will sweep from Canarias across the mainland, threatening to coat cars, villas, and private swimming pools in layers of red dust.

While meteorologists state the phenomenon does not technically qualify as an official ‘heatwave’ in mainland Spain due to strict legal definitions based on July and August historical thresholds, health authorities have warned vulnerable expats to take immediate precautions against heatstroke due to the sudden spike in temperature.

Worse is to come for coastal communities, as this weekend’s emergency heat dome marks the starting gun for what experts predict will be a punishingly long summer.

AEMET’s newly released seasonal consensus forecast for May, June, and July reveals a ‘very high probability’ that average temperatures across the entire country will remain in the highest historical brackets compared to the 1991–2020 reference period.

The extreme heat anomaly will be most severe and pronounced across the Mediterranean coast — including the Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca — and The Balearics.

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AEMET has confirmed there is no sign of rainy relief on the horizon for the driest areas, less of a concern on the back of record reservoir levels.

While northeast Spain including Barcelona and The Balearics could see some wetter-than-average anomalies, the rest of Spain, including Andalucia, is locked into standard, bone-dry climatological trends.

Expats are being urged to prepare for an early spike in electricity bills as air conditioning units are switched on weeks ahead of schedule to combat the lasting heat.
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