Bringing to & Keeping British Cars in Spain

If you have become a resident of Spain, you happen to have brought your British car with you and you’re intending to stay here with that car, this post might be of some interest to you.


If you haven't taken up residence here in Spain yet and are thinking of bringing your r/h drive British car here DON'T - sell it in blighty and use the money when you get out here to buy a Spanish car - far, far easier believe me.

Use the following link for some very useful information
http://www.thinkspain.com/hottopics/drivingcarsinspain/owning.asp 

First let me mention a brilliant Spanish guy call Miguel Angel Macias Galvez who is based in our village Puerto Lope. I’ll explain later – meanwhile his service link    http://www.moclinescudodegranada.es/migue.html

If you have lived and had the British vehicle in Spain for 182 days (roughly 6 months) or more then you are required under Spanish law to register that vehicle in Spain and in so doing change to Spanish plates (las placas de matrícula)


Basically what that means is: if you live here in Spain, have had your British car here for longer than 6 months and are still driving it about on British plates, then you are using it illegally. And remember if you are doing that then your British insurance is invalidated as well; you are driving without insurance. British registered cars MUST have current UK tax and MOT and should not have been in the country - and you would have to be able to prove the fact in say the event of an accident - for more than 6 months. Strictly speaking you can only drive it about here as a tourist on British plates and insurance, that’s all.

Some officials and ex-pats here will tell you that the re-registration process is protracted and time consuming, made more difficult if you have been procrastinating with your Spanish lessons. Well it isn’t if you happen to know or be aware of Miguel Galvez in Puerto Lope.

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A few years ago, when we were enthusiastically making our plans to retire to Spain, J had the idea of buying a left-hand drive car in England so that we could load it up with some of our personal belongings then spend a little holiday bringing it out here driving down through France and Spain to Andalucía – clever girl.

We live in a mountainous district a thousand metres above sea level where the Granada & Jaen provinces’ meet. Some of the regional terrain can be a little daunting and a number of the side roads are not that much better. We also visit a few of the local small villages from time to time – if you have ever done that in this part of Spain you’ll know that the roads are extremely narrow and at times ascend almost vertically in some of the Pueblo’s like Castillo de Locubin; so we thought a modest little 4 x 4 was in order.

We bought an old (1995) Suzuki Vitara JLX l/h drive, loaded it to the gunnels and took a couple of days to drive it out here; it’s been here about 2 years. It has saved us a fortune in car-hire charges - we’d get up to the house each time we came out, jump start it – and it would do us for the duration of our stay, brilliant. But now we live here it was time to get it legal, step up Miguel.

To make a long story short – Miguel took care of everything even getting the new las placas de matrícula (number plates). We had gotten a previous quote (against which) by going to Miguel we saved ourselves in the region of 500 euros. Total cost to us (inc' ITV, changing the headlights and Miguel's fee) was 689 euros

We got the headlights changed ourselves by the guy at the taller (workshop) in the village [that is a legal requirement, same with the rear lights if needs be] and we had to take the car to have the ITV (MOT) done in Granada, but apart from that everything else was taken care of rather professionally by Miguel – Muchas gracias senor Galvez