There are three embassies in the UK that deal with visas. Find out which one you should apply to for your visa – with maps and full lists of counties.

Prefer to watch the video? Click above. For the conversational facts, carry on reading…

If you live in the UK and need a visa to live in Spain, then you need to go to one of the three Spanish consulates in the UK that deal with visas.

So which one do you go to? That depends which county or part of the UK you have your main residence. 

The three consulates are:

Edinburgh in the north, Manchester in the middle, and London in the south.

NOTE: Most people on social media call them the embassies, but in some cities there’s an embassy building and a consulate building, and it’s the consulate you’ll need to go to for your appointment.

Plenty of people have turned up at the wrong address, missed their time slot and had to re-book it, and that’s no fun if you’ve come all the way from the Isle of Man or Aberystwyth for example.

This first map below shows you the catchment area of the Manchester consulate

As you can see, Wales and the Isle of Man are in this area, so if you live there, you need to apply to the Manchester embassy. The English counties covered by Manchester are:

Lancashire
Merseyside
Cheshire
Greater Manchester
All of the Yorkshires
Derbyshire
Nottinghamshire
Lincolnshire
Rutland
Leicestershire
Northamptonshire
Warwickshire
West Midlands
Staffordshire
Shropshire
Worcestershire 
Herefordshire

This next map is for the London Consulate. 

London covers all of the dependencies and overseas territories as well as all of the British counties in the three parts of the south of England, which are:

South West
Gloucestershire
Bristol (unitary authority)
Wiltshire
Somerset 
Dorset
Devon
Cornwall
Isles of Scilly

South East
Oxfordshire
Buckinghamshire
Berkshire
Greater London
Hampshire
Surrey
West Sussex
East Sussex
Kent
Isle of Wight

Eastern
Norfolk
Cambridgeshire
Bedfordshire
Hertfordshire
Essex

Let’s go right up north now and see what the catchment area for the Edinburgh Consulate is.

This covers the whole of Scotland including the islands further north, plus Northern Ireland and the most northern counties of England, which are:
Cleveland
Cumbria
Durham
Norhumberland
Tyne & Wear
Tees Valley.

Article by Skatz