Blogger Maddie (@relocation.family) shares personal experience moving to Spain with a dog.
Maddie with her husband Tim and their two children Lawrence (age 4) and Sully (age 3) moved from the UK in September 2020. Now the family lives in Cartagena (Region of Murcia, south-eastern Spain). Their dog – American Bulldog Bonnie – is 6 years old now, Maddie’s family has had her since she was 6 months. Until coming to Spain the furthest Bonnie had travelled was a couple of hours in the car.
How did you prepare for transporting the dog?
Before travel she needed a dog passport which required vaccinations – the only essential vaccination was the Rabies. The vaccination and passport together cost around £120. Depending which vaccinations your dog has you need to leave a month between those and the rabies jab. It was otherwise an easy process.
What were the main difficulties in moving the dog to another country?
Bonnie is an anxious dog. She’s scared of many things. In the planning of our move, aside from finding a place to live, Bonnie was the main job on my list – move her in the least stressful way.
So we needed her to be transported individually which was hard to arrange without costing a lot of money. I used the Expat Facebook pages to look for people and put up a post stating our needs – we had two different people who run dog transportation businesses offer to take her solo at a reasonable cost because they had an empty journey back from the UK. The cost was £325 and Bonnie was by driver’s side the whole journey. She arrived safely.
We also found a holistic therapy company who sell a natural remedy for anxious dogs which we started using a couple weeks before leaving and continued to use once in Spain for at least a month whilst she settled in.
What is about veterinary services in Spain? Are there many clinics in your area?
There are three veterinary clinics within five minutes of our house and most towns we drive through we see one. We are only just making arrangements to take Bonnie to the vets to have her microchip registered here. We haven’t done it sooner because we were waiting for our NIE number to come. Besides we are expecting to have to get a license to keep Bonnie here, it is needed for certain large/strong/aggressive breeds.
What you can advise expat who moves with the animal?
My advice is to do your research. It’s been really easy to be fair.
Maddie in Instagram