COPY LINK

For members

TRAVEL NEWS

A step-by-step guide on how to fill out Spain’s Health Control Form

Here's everything you need to know about how to fill out Spain's Health Control Form, which you may need to complete before entering the country.

Published: 25 March 2022 13:51 CET

A step-by-step guide on how to fill out Spain’s Health Control Form

Want help with every step of filling out Spain’s travel health control form? Here is our guide. Photo: Ben Kolde/Unsplash

On April 6th the Spanish government changed the rules regarding its Travel Health Form, which previously all passengers had to fill out before arrival in Spain.

Now, those travellers with an EU Digital Certificate or EU Equivalent only need to show their certificates upon arrival at the airport instead and are not required to complete the form.

Read on to find out if you are obliged to fill out the form or not. Those unsure exactly how to go about filling out, the form should follow our handy step-by-step guide below to make it easier for you.

Check if you need to complete the form:

All holders of an EU Digital Covid Certificate or equivalent now don’t need to complete the form.

So far, 37 non-EU countries (and territories) have joined the EU Digital COVID Certificate system, meaning that their equivalent certificates are accepted in the EU under the same conditions as the EU Digital COVID Certificate. Likewise, the EU Digital COVID Certificate is accepted by those 37 countries.

The list includes countries such as the UK, New Zealand, Israel, Singapore and Malyasia, but does not include the US, Canada or Australia. In order to check the validity of your certificate and if your country is one of the 37 read on.

Check validity

The first step is to visit https://www.spth.gob.es/ where you can access the form. You can also access it via the app here.

The first thing that the site will do is to give you two options – a yellow button for those who have an EU Digital Certificate or equivalent and a blue button for those who don’t.

Click on the option that applies to you or click on the yellow box to see if your certificate is valid. Photo: Spain Travel Health

To check if your certificate is valid for entry to Spain or whether you still need to complete the Health Control Form, click on the yellow button that says ‘EU Digital Certificate or EU equivalent’ to check or click here.

First, you will need to introduce your date of arrival in Spain and indicate the country of origin of your trip, before uploading your certificate to the site.

Check here to see if your certificate is valid or not. Photo: Spain Travel Health

Filling out the form

If you do still need to complete the Spain Travel Health Form, click on the blue button on the homepage. You will then select whether you need to fill out an Individual FCS form or a Family/Group FCS form. Remember that each person in the group (including children) needs their own form. If you’re travelling as a couple, for example, each partner must complete their own individual form.

Next, fill out your passenger data, including names, passport or ID number, your flight number and e-mail address. Make sure this information is correct as you can’t go back and change it later. At the bottom, check the box if you’re transiting or if you’ve filled out the information for a minor and send the form.

spain Covid form

Spain’s Health Control Form. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

Step 1:

You will then receive an e-mail stating that your details have been correctly registered and will be given a link to complete the second part of the form. You will also receive a code you need in order to access the next steps.

This second part can only be filled out within the 48 hours before arrival into Spain. If you have done this ahead of time, you can continue with your form at a later date by clicking the ‘continue with form’ buttons on the home page.

You will need a security code to fill out the second part of the form. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

In order to fill out this second part, you will need your passport details, your proof of vaccination or recovery certificate, and your boarding pass on hand.

This part has five steps to complete. The first step will be to check your personal details are all correct and fill out the rest before saving and continuing.

Step 1: Filling in your personal information. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

Step 2:

The next step is to do with your flight information. You have already filled out your flight number and arrival date, but here you will need to fill out extra information such as the airline name and your seat number, which should be on your boarding pass.

For this step, you will also need to complete the details of where you will be staying in Spain, either the name and address of your hotel if you’re a tourist, the address of friends and family if you’re visiting people you know, or your own address if you’re resident in Spain.

Complete your flight info and where you are staying. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

Step 3:

Step three of the form will ask you about your travel history, including the origin country of your trip and any other countries you’ve passed through in the past 14 days. Choose and add the number of countries necessary. Underneath, the form will also ask you the reason for travel.

Step 3: Complete your travel history info. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

Step 4:

Step 4 is Spain’s health questionnaire, asking you whether you’ve been in contact with someone who has had Covid-19 in the past 14 days, as well as information about your vaccination and recovery status.

Select the type of certificate you have and the reason for it.

If you have selected vaccination as your reason, you will need to then fill out details about the type of vaccine you received, where you had it and the date on which you had your last dose. You may also need to upload your certificate to the website and wait for it to be validated or your certificate may be validated upon arrival.

Similarly, you will have to fill out the necessary details about your negative Covid test or recovery certificate.

Fill in the details of the health questionnaire. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

Step 5:

The final part of the form is signing an affidavit, agreeing to isolate if you experience any Covid-19 symptoms while in Spain.

Step 5: Sign the affidavit and complete the process. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

This will then end the process and you should get an automatic message telling you that your form was completed correctly. It will also give you a choice to download your QR code in PDF format or in a wallet format for your phone.

You will also receive it via e-mail, so don’t worry if you can’t download it straight away. When you’re done, click on finalise to finish the whole process.

You can now download your QR code. Photo: www.spth.gob.es

READ ALSO: The most common problems with the Spain Travel Health app and some potential solutions

Member comments

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Good tourist, bad tourist: How to travel responsibly in Spain

Barcelona resident David Mar doesn’t travel, but he thinks about tourism every day.

Tourists crowd the buses — essential for movement in a hilly neighbourhood like his. They leave trash for residents to discover in the morning. They shout and sing at night and wander drunkenly through the residential streets, ambling into backyards and pulling down laundry on clotheslines.

“It’s a disturbance that goes from when you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he told The Local Spain. “You don’t feel welcome in your own neighbourhood.”

Mar lives in Turó de la Rovira, on a 262-metre hill that towers over the city.

A viewpoint atop the hill called Los Bunkers de Carmel has gone viral on TikTok for its sweeping city views, bringing hordes of tourists to come drink wine, watch the sunset, and sometimes party into the early morning.

But for the residents of the surrounding Carmel neighbourhood — among Barcelona’s poorest — the consequences of this tourist explosion have been severe.

Mar was involved in a physical altercation with a group of four Australians, after he confronted them for tipping over parked motorcycles.

And last June a 76 year-old man was assaulted by a group of seven English-speaking youths after he tried to stop them from jumping a fence that had been put up around the Bunkers.

Such events are commonplace in Carmel, Mar says, with the post-pandemic massification of tourism provoking an unstoppable flow of Instagram-like-hungry travellers, fuelled by an increasingly lucrative industry whose interests often conflict with those of local residents.

“It collides directly with the most basic rights of those who live here,” Mar says. “Our right to housing, our right to transportation, our right to rest peacefully.”

With some 1.3 billion international arrivals globally in 2023, more people are travelling for pleasure than ever before in human history.

But as excessive crowds stress infrastructure and locals find themselves pushed out of their own communities, prevailing attitudes towards travel must be reconsidered if global tourism is to continue growing sustainably.

“Tourism isn’t a right, it’s a decision that you make,” Mar says. “And if you do it, you must be aware of the consequences it can generate.”

A couple uses a selfie stick to take a picture next to a banner warning tourists on drought alert in Catalonia, near Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Empathy abroad

Bartolomé Deyá Tortella, a researcher and the Dean of Tourism Faculty at the University of the Balearic Islands, says few tourists consider such consequences.

Instead, they embrace their inner hedonist and focus their vacation time on maximum pleasure for minimum price. This mindset might cause a tourist to forget their values and do things they’d never do at home.

“We all become capitalists when we practice tourism,” Deyá told The Local. “You think, ‘I paid for this, I’m on vacation, I’m having my moment of pleasure, I worked the whole year for it.”

Such thinking could explain why someone might respect quiet hours in their own neighbourhoods, but shout drunkenly in the streets late at night while on vacation.

Or why on a trip to Mallorca, where Deyá lives and works, a tourist might feel compelled to take a 10-minute shower — despite the water-stressed Mediterranean island’s near-drought conditions — while residents routinely shower in a minute or less.

Failure to consider saving water or respecting quiet hours comes down to lack of empathy, Deyá says, and our tendency to other the people whose communities we enter while traveling.

“Act as if you were in your own home,” he says. “If when you’re in your own city you don’t shout in the street because you know your neighbours are sleeping, why do it when you’re traveling?”

Social sustainability

Much has been said about environmental sustainability, but it’s easy to forget the social impacts of travel; how our interactions with local people and economies can change that society.

“When every one of us travels, it implies that the places where we came from are transformed, the places we pass through are transformed, and obviously, so are the places we arrive to,” Manuel de la Calle Vaquero, Vicedean of the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism at Complutense University of Madrid, told The Local Spain.

With this in mind, the most sustainable way to travel is by using one’s presence to positively impact the local community.

Or in other words, to leave a place better than you found it.

“When you jump on a plane, it’s important to make sure that trip counts for something positive,” says Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, a holiday company that collaborates with local partners to plan socially and environmentally sustainable vacations.

“I advise people to fly less, keep short trips flight-free – and, when you do fly, stay in a place longer and travel in a way that does as much good as possible,” Francis says.

Anti-gentrification banners addressing were already hanging from balconies in Barcelona back in 2017. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Neighbourhood colonisers

One of the most significant ways in which tourism can alter the social landscape is through accommodation.

Not long ago, tourists and residents in Spain did not typically mix, with tourists sticking near their hotels, rarely straying into residential zones, Deyá says.

But today’s tourist has matured, and now expects novelty; an “authentic” experience that they can convince themselves distinguishes them from the thousands of other tourists expecting the same.

Nowadays they live among residents, in apartments instead of hotels, utilizing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which has led to the dissolution of boundaries between a city’s tourist and local zones.

Vaquero describes this new kind of tourist as the “anti-tourism” tourist, in the sense that they’re not interested in the sort of tourism promoted by governments and travel agencies, but instead consider themselves the explorers of new “authentic” destinations outside the typical tourist sphere.

“The one who wants to leave the traditional tourist circuit and supposedly goes looking for ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods — that tourist is obviously the coloniser,” Vaquero says.

The boom in short-term vacation rentals has led to what’s been dubbed the “Airbnb effect” in neighbourhoods worldwide, in which residents are slowly replaced by a constant flux of tourists. For landlords, vacation rentals can be far more lucrative than renting to residents, thus incentivizing them to evict long-term tenants in order to list their properties on Airbnb.

This is exactly what happened to Emanuele Dal Carlo. His landlord didn’t want to renew the lease on his small Venice apartment because they could make more renting it out on Airbnb. Like so many other Venetians, Dal Carlo had to move to the mainland.

To better understand the cultural erosion he saw happening to his city as a result of Airbnb, Dal Carlo enlisted the help of researchers to conduct a study, through which he discovered only 2,000 of the 3,300 Airbnbs in the city were registered with the government, and many were rented by foreign hosts with zero connection to Venice.

This means that much of the money tourists spend on accommodation never lands on the ground, thus eliminating any potential benefit to the local economy.

“What’s wrong is that the money available from tourism is not fairly distributed between workers and residents,” Dal Carlo says.

Dal Carlo now runs Fairbnb, an ethical Airbnb alternative which promotes “community-powered tourism.” Hosts are certified local, and the platform fees are put directly towards a social project in the local community, like food redistribution or sustainable energy initiatives.

As a tourist, the best way to avoid feeding the problem is by avoiding short term rentals when possible, Dal Carlo says, and instead booking accommodations with local businesses, like small independent hotels or traditional bed and breakfasts.

And if you absolutely must use Airbnb, Dal Carlo suggests booking with local hosts.

“If you’re traveling to Venice and your host is from Finland, ask yourself some questions,” he says.

An elderly local man on crutches waits to cross as a group of tourists using Segways squeeze by and into the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Whose fault?

In Spain, anti-tourism protests have crescendoed in recent weeks. The travel industry, it seems, has grown beyond its means, and locals are taking note.

To some degree, the problem can be traced to poor planning on the part of local governments and the unchecked expansion of algorithmic platforms like Airbnb.

Deyá points out that many government entities in Spain have welcomed tourist money, pursuing marketing campaigns without investing in adequate preparation.

“Tourism is the typical sector where many governments say, ‘ok, let’s leave it, because this works. Don’t touch it,’” Deyá says. “But there’s been no planning, there’s been no strategy.”

Back in Barcelona, the city’s public transport authority was involved in the promotion of the Carmel bunkers through its Bus Turistic webpage, encouraging tourists to come see the “spectacular views over Barcelona.”

The promotion was taken down on April 16th after continued anti-tourism protests from the Turó de la Rovira neighbourhood council, of which Mar is a member.

But as is the case with so many industries in a crowded world full of contradictions, the individual cannot be absolved of all responsibility, as one’s choice to participate in harmful systems enables their continuation.

No law or tourist tax will compel tourists to act with empathy, and the absence of such regulations should not be used to justify one’s bad behaviour abroad.

“The problem is that we’re hypocrites, and we think that it’s someone else who has to solve the problem,” Deyá says.

Mar, who’s never been much of a traveller himself, is no longer interested in traveling internationally after seeing what tourism has done to his city.

“So much of my city has become inhospitable for residents,” he says. “Because we’re truly suffering from it here in Barcelona, the concept of tourism disgusts me more and more.”

READ ALSO:

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!