Morocco’s consulates in Spain are dealing with a sharp rise in applications from migrants trying to gather the documents required for Spain’s latest regularization process, pushing several offices into extended hours and weekend operations as demand outpaces normal capacity, Spanish media reported.
The pressure is centered on one document: Morocco’s criminal record certificate, or fiche anthropométrique, which applicants need in order to move forward with residency procedures in Spain.
For Moroccan nationals, obtaining that paper has become the main administrative hurdle, driving long lines outside consulates in Madrid, Almería, Barcelona, Valencia and Tarragona.
In Madrid, more than 1,000 people passed through the consulate in a few hours on Wednesday, according to a consular source cited by Spanish outlet El National.
In Almería, the figure reached nearly 8,000 visitors on a single Saturday earlier this month. The scale of those numbers helps explain why staffing, security and appointment systems have come under strain.
A February 13 communiqué from Morocco’s consulate in Valencia said demand had risen by more than 300% since late January, pushing daily transactions to nearly 800 and leading the post to extend hours until 6 p.m. and open on weekends.
Most requests involved criminal record certificates, passports and identity cards. The consulate said it had extended public hours until 6 p.m. and opened on Saturdays and Sundays.
On February 11, several Moroccan consulates in Spain introduced a simplified procedure allowing applicants to request criminal record certificates with Apostille stamps directly through consular services, removing the need to grant power of attorney or travel back to Morocco.
The measure was coordinated with Morocco’s foreign ministry, embassy in Madrid, interior ministry and national police.
That adjustment removed one obstacle, but not the bottleneck itself. In Barcelona, consular staff said roughly 400 appointments a day were nearly full after the regularization process was approved, while applicants without appointments were still being turned away.
Some people have traveled to other cities based on word of mouth about faster processing.
According to Morocco’s Ministry of Inclusion, Moroccan nationals are among the primary expected beneficiaries of the decree, with the community representing one of the largest foreign-born groups in Spain.
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