Descendants of those prosecuted and expelled from Spain during the regime of dictator Francisco Franco, will be eligible to apply for Spanish citizenship under the Grandchildren’s Law for another over year extra, as the same has been extended until October 21, 2025.
The law was previously scheduled to expire on October 21, this year, SchengenVisaInfo reports.
The extension of the law, officially called the Democratic Memory Law and known as the Ley de Nietos in Spanish, has been approved through an Agreement of the Council of Ministers.
Commenting on the prolongation of the deadline with an additional one year, the Spanish Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres Pérez, noted that the move ensures to provide justice to descendants of exiled Spaniards.
As the law itself states through provision 8, we will give one more year of extension until the end of 2025 so that these processes can be carried out for the descendants of Spaniards who left our country in the years of the dictatorship.
Record Applications Filed in Argentina for Citizenship by Grandchildren of Exiled Spaniards
Immediately after the law came into effect in October 2022, the Spanish consulates in Argentina were flooded with applications.
Just a few months later, in January 2023, the Consulate General in Buenos Aires warned the Spain authorities that it was struggling to keep up with the number of applications, in spite of five offices processing such applications in Córdoba, Bahía Blanca, Rosario, Buenos Aires and Mendoza.
In an interview for La Nacion, the Consul General of Spain in Buenos Aires, Fernando Garcia Casas, revealed that since October 2022, the Consulate has fully documented 8,500 new Spaniards in Argentina.
Since the law came out, which has been 14 months, we have had 8,500 new Spaniards fully documented, 46,000 pending files already received and 182,000 with hearings scheduled and being held.
He also pointed out that since the consulate usually received 460 such applications daily, by October 21, 2025 there will be over 500,000 Spanish Argentines, or 150,000 more than currently.
In total, 182,400 applications for Spanish nationality, have been filed worldwide under the Grandchildren’s Law, 51 per cent of which (91,996) have been approved.
