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Around 2.45 million people have applied for Spanish nationality under the Democratic Memory Law, popularly known as the "Grandchildren's Law," since the law came into effect in October 2022.
Argentina and Mexico lead in applications, according to data revealed this Saturday to EFE by Violeta Alonso, president of the General Council of Spanish Citizenship Abroad (CGCEE).
Argentina accounts for approximately 40% of all applications, with around 650,000 requests just in the Buenos Aires area, which could make that city the third-largest in the world for Spanish nationals, after Madrid and Barcelona.
Mexico ranks second with 117,226 applications.
The ranking of consulates by request volume confirms Buenos Aires in first place, followed by Mexico. The third position goes to São Paulo (Brazil), the fifth to Havana, and the sixth to Miami, where there is a large Cuban community.
In Cuba, over 107,000 people submitted formal applications - 12.24% of the global total - with estimates suggesting that more than 350,000 Cubans initiated some type of process, positioning the Havana Consulate as one of the most active globally.
However, the process was marked by irregularities, technical failures, and consular overload. Many Cubans were unable to complete their procedures on time and reported a lack of transparency from the consulate.
Prospects for applicants
As of March 31, consulates had received 1.2 million applications in person, of which 545,000 were approved and 306,500 are already registered in the Civil Registry.
"There are very few denials," noted Violeta Alonso.
The data confirms that the denial rate is only 2%, which suggests that more than 2 million new nationalities will be granted by the end of the process.
These figures more than double the approximately 503,000 applications registered under the previous Historical Memory Law of 2007.
The result is clear: if in 2010 there were 1.5 million Spaniards living in other countries and today there are 3.2 million, the Government's projection is that by the time all the paperwork is processed, the number of Spaniards registered abroad will exceed five million.
When will the process conclude?
Although the aspiration is for the process to be completed in about four or five years, ("that would be a reasonable timeframe," according to the president of CGCEE), the reality is that the bureaucratic collapse is monumental.
Violeta Alonso herself said last October that at the current pace of processing applications, it would take 20 years to address all nationality requests submitted.
The deadline for submitting new applications closed on October 22, 2025, after two years of the law's validity and an additional one-year extension.
The CGCEE has warned that the system "creates legal insecurity, inequality of opportunity, and a bureaucratic collapse that could last for decades," and has formally proposed to Congress and the Senate a reform of the Civil Code to establish the right to nationality by descent as a permanent right, without deadlines or generational limits.
Spain is considering granting nationality to descendants indefinitely, although Minister Ángel Víctor Torres warned that "any structural change must have broad political agreement."
The Spanish government has invested 115 million euros in a consular modernization plan and has reinforced the most affected consulates with an additional 150 positions. However, the extent of the backlog makes a definitive solution still uncertain.
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