Last Updated on March 18, 2026 by Bruno Bianchi
San Francisco Consulate – Non lucrative Spain visa
We received our non lucrative Spain visa two weeks ago (October 2022) from the San Francisco consulate! I wanted to post a little bit about our experience in the hopes that it might help other SF jurisdiction folks. Hang in there, friends!
We emailed the consulate (cog.sanfrancisco.vis@maec.es) for the first time back in mid-June 2022 with our application materials attached, requesting an appointment and received an auto generated email in response. We heard nothing back for the next two months despite sending multiple emails. So finally, in September 2022, a week before our kids were supposed to be starting school in Sevilla, we decided (based on some other posts we read in Spainguru’s Spanish non lucrative Spain visa group) to mail in all of our application materials and passports directly to the consulate via USPS with a prepaid return envelope inside.
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Start the Moving to Spain Hub →Before doing so though, we applied for and received second passports, so that we could still travel to Spain on a tourist visa while awaiting our non lucrative Spain visa approval.
5 weeks later we received our passports with our visas without ever having received any direct communication from the consulate!
We plan to travel to the UK in the next couple of weeks, so that we can re-enter the EU with our official passports and visas and start the residency process. This was definitely a “hail Mary” for us, but it worked!
The process seems to be changing on a regular basis, but I would say, if you aren’t having any luck in getting a response from them or some clear instructions, this approach may be worth considering. I wish we had done it sooner.
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