The Spanish government has extended the deadline to apply for citizenship through the Grandchildren’s Law (Ley de Nietos in Spanish) until the end of 2025.

The application window was initially scheduled to run until October 2024 but was pushed back to allow for bureaucratic processes to run their course amid a rise in applications.

The Grandchildren’s Law allows for descendants of Spaniards who fled Spain during the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship to claim Spanish citizenship without ever having lived there.

Spain’s Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, announced on February 29th that the deadline to apply will be extended for another year. The Grandchildren’s Law was included as part of the broader Law of Democratic Memory, sometimes called the Historical Memory Law, passed in October 2022.

It is a piece of wide-ranging but controversial legislation that aims to settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past and deal with the complicated legacies of its Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.

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The Minister also acknowledged that the administrative procedures involved in obtaining Spanish nationality are not simple, and that the upcoming deadline “will be extended so that these processes can be carried out.”

So far, at least 69,000 people have received Spanish nationality around the world, mostly in Latin American countries. When the Democratic Memory Law was passed it was estimated that the legislation would allow as many as 700,000 foreigners with Spanish lineage to get Spanish citizenship.

The subsequent surge in applications presented some administrative difficulties, however, especially due to the fact the vast majority of these applications are made from abroad, and in 2023 the Spanish press reported that the sheer number of applicants meant that procedures were ‘relaxed’.

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This, in turn, led to concerns that there might have been possible document falsification.

The surge for citizenship, termed “massive nationalisations” in the Spanish press, led to alleged ‘procedural relaxation” that could “open the door to a lawsuit for alleged prevarication and false documentation” and even “provoke a question of unconstitutionality,” according to la Asociación por la Reconciliación y la Verdad Histórica, a group that has been opposed to Historical Memory legislation since the original law back in 2007.

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Who is eligible for the grandchildren’s law?

Who is eligible for Spanish citizenship under the new law? There are a number of groups included.

• Children or grandchildren born outside Spain to a Spanish father, mother, grandfather, or grandmother who was exiled and left Spain due to ‘physical, moral or psychological damage, economic damage or the loss of fundamental rights’, or renounced their Spanish nationality.
• People born outside Spain to Spanish women who lost their nationality by marrying foreigners before the 1978 Constitution was established.
• The adult sons and daughters of Spaniards who gained nationality due to the 2007 Democratic Memory law.