Madrid (EFE).- The traffic jam to get married in the courts is not new, but the wait has become more evident with the strike of officials from the administration of Justice, postponed from Wednesday until after the elections and which has “paralyzed ” the Civil Registry for a month and a half.
Since the workers turned their partial strikes into an indefinite strike on May 22, the authorization of marriages that are celebrated in the courts of Madrid -non-Catholic civil and religious liaisons- has been “totally paralyzed”, as well as the signaling of new wedding ceremonies, assures EFE Tirso Echeandía, procedural manager of marriages of the Civil Registry of Madrid, where he tells that the panorama this time has been “desolate”.
In his opinion, it has been a general situation throughout Spain, since the work in Justice is “as a team, from top to bottom” and “if pieces are missing”, like the workers who have been on strike and still have some specific strikes, the gear “doesn’t work”.
More collapse in the Civil Registry due to the Justice strike
The only weddings that have been celebrated have been those ‘in articulo mortis’ and those of authorization files prior to the strike and whose ceremony had already been indicated before, says Echeandía, who explains that most sections of the Civil Registry have been paralyzed or, in the best of cases, they have been very slow and accumulate a long delay.
“It will take months” to catch up with these procedures. In the case of Madrid, he calculates that about three or four, and remembers that you can always choose to get married before a notary, although it is no longer free.
However, the traffic jams in the civil registries are not a novelty: Elena requested an appointment in August 2022 and got it on May 11, 2023, with the bad luck that the strike caught her and she found that there were no services minimum requirements to process marriage records.
They put her on a list and didn’t even let her into the building. So she decided to use the notary route.
Less weddings, but more before a notary
According to data from the General Council of Notaries (CGN), 19,465 couples were married before a notary last year, 47% more than in 2021.
In that year there were 13,257 marriages celebrated in notaries, of the 148,588 total -123,631 civil and 24,957 religious-, according to the latest statistics from the INE’s Natural Movement of the Population, for the year 2021.
This study shows that the trend is to marry less: from 216,451 in the year 2000, weddings suffered a large drop between 2004 and 2010 to 167,247, and have continued to decrease every year since 2016 – without taking into account the 2020 pandemic.
The decline is even more notable in Catholic weddings, which have been reduced by less than half since 2010, when there were 74,289 Church weddings, according to the annual reports of the Episcopal Conference.
However, the number of couples who say “yes, I do” before a notary is growing, a possible option since July 2015 and which has increased year by year.
Times and cost of getting married before a notary
The CGN spokeswoman, Teresa Barea, estimates in a conversation with EFE that, if all the documents are in order, a wedding couple can be summoned even within a week.
Berta was married before a notary for this reason in July of last year: when she requested an appointment in May at the Civil Registry, they gave it to her for January 2023.
But the notary cannot be chosen, rather it is the notarial association of each autonomous community that assigns the couple one of the 2,800 professionals in Spain to carry out the process, whose price may also vary. Elena, for example, was charged 450 euros for managing the marriage file.
The notarial fee for the marriage deed is always the same, between 120 and 150 euros, a free procedure at the Civil Registry. But the file, prior to the wedding itself, depends on the volume and complexity of the documentation and the rates of each office: the paperwork for two single Spanish citizens will be easier than for foreigners with a sworn translation and, therefore, also cheaper, exemplifies Barea.