How Long Can You Stay in One Place?
Source: hjl from flickr
Imagine that everything is planned for your trip. You have some money saved, you’ve picked a nice sunny spot, plane tickets are booked, a villa on the Mediterranean is rented, and you are all ready to go. One of the easiest thing to overlook is rules around visitor visas. You may want to go to Europe for six months, but what will happen when you show up at the border?
In an ideal world, you can just travel anywhere and everywhere without preapproval or restrictions. But in the real world, there are borders, passport controls, and there are visa requirements. It turns out that countries are actually pretty particular about who crosses their borders (who knew!).
For the EU, the rule is that you can visit for a maximum of 90 days in any 6 month period on a regular visitor visa.
What this means that if show up at the border expecting to go there for 6 consecutive months, you will only be allowed in for 3 (or might just be turned around on the next flight back home). Also, you cannot just leave Europe for a day and expect the 3 month clock to restart.
For many countries, you do not need to apply for this 3 month visa in advance – you just show up at the border. Other countries need to apply for a Schengen visa which is good for the EU region. For many people, 3 months is plenty of time. But for a true sabbatical, you are going to need longer than that. So how can you stay in a place for longer than 3 months? Luckily, there is a visa for that too.
EU countries also have a long stay visitor visa for visiting longer than 3 months.
As you would expect, the requirements to obtain this visa are a lot more complex than just a regular visitor visa. You generally have to apply for this visa before you’ve booked plane tickets or made any other financial commitment to travel. This process could take quite a long time to get approved – 8 to 10 weeks is their estimate. Besides the basic documents applying for the visa, you also have to submit a police report stating your criminal record (or hopefully lack thereof). The country you are visiting will also want some financial documents showing that you can be self-sufficient for the period you are staying in their country and will not require governmental support. You also need to include details of where you are staying, like including a copy of the rental agreement, and indicate that you will not work while in their country. And even promise to get medical insurance once you arrive.
As you can see, the long stay visas can be time consuming and tricky to apply for. They simply want to be sure that you do not end up staying in their country beyond your approved time, as a way of avoiding the proper immigration process. It can be daunting, and you may want to consider using an immigration expert for the first time to make sure you don’t get delayed or rejected for some basic error on the forms.
The other thing about an EU long stay visa is that it only applies to one country. So if you get a long stay visa from Spain, you still can only visit other parts of Europe within the first 90 days on a regular visitor visa.
All of these regulations may want to make you think twice about taking a vacation of more than 3 months in Europe. It certainly makes spending 6 months a year there sound daunting. (Maybe it’s easier after the 2nd or 3rd time.) You may want to consider arranging your sabbatical so that you only spend 3 months in Europe, and at least 3 months outside of the EU zone. I hear South America is nice.
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