Hi All -

I am planning on moving with my Spanish wife next month to Spain, where I will apply for residency. We will obviously be living together and so will empadronar ourselves wherever we end up living. We have been told that sometimes after you put in the application for empadronamiento at the padron that the local police may come to check up on you to look for proof that you are living together, interview your neighbours about your activities, an so on. Does anyone have any experience with this? When I told my wife that this can happen she just laughed out loud and said that she cannot imagine any local police precinct sending out officers to do a conviviencia checkup on a couple.

Does this actually happen in practice or is it just something they CAN do but rarely actually do? And has anyone ever been through it? What if you’re not home? Or if one of you is out shopping when the police stop by - or worse, out of the country at the time? And what if you’ve just moved there - how on earth will the neighbours know anything about you?!

Thanks in advance for any words of wisdom!