I have a lovely energetic 4 year old daughter who needs to be kept active so my wife and I thought it would be great to send her to some tennis and swimming lessons run by the Marbella council. The council runs various courses and they are real value for money. (more often or not they are run in Spanish but most kids living here speak Spanish anyway)

She already knows how to swim very well but swimming lessons might offer some refinement to her current swimming technique. We are not sure if she will like tennis but she always shrieks in joy when she sees Raffa Nadal playing tennis or in an advert.

So, my wife is currently working and seeing I work from home and work for myself it allows me the flexibility to fulfill some parental duties during business hours such as getting the right documentation so that our daughter can attend the lessons.

Aha…”documentation?” I hear you all cry. Yes, in order that your child can qualify to attend the municipally funded lessons or activities, when you sign up you have to provide a “CERTIFICADO DE EMPADRONAMIENTO” which is a certificate to show that your child is registered with the town hall. Of course, this means that you and your child need to be registered on the “Padron” or the Municipal registry.

If you are already registered for the “Padron” then read on. If you child is registered on the “Padron” read on, if not, quickly get yourself down to the town hall and register.

NOTE: being registered on the Padron allows the council to access more government funds in order to serve the community better so the more people registered with the town hall the better the resources for the council, if lots of people are here in Marbella and dont register it means that the town hall becomes under resourced in terms of funding as it has to meet the needs of the public whilst being under funded. So real important and responsible for anyone who should be registered to go and register.

Okay, so here is what I had to do this morning to get my certificate.

1. Go to town hall in Los Naranjos (Orange Square)
2. Request the certificates downstairs
3. Pay for the certificates on second floor
4. Collect the certificates back downstairs

My lovely wife made it easy for me to request the certificates as she wrote the words on a piece of paper and I presented it to the lady behind the desk, all I did was add “Por Favor” and “Gracias”, and smiled when doing handling my request.

Just print this off and use it as is. Substitute the blurred out bits with your childs name.

So once you are in the town hall reception, you will have to go through security so you will need your Passport or DNI card to get through, the desk to make the request for the certificates is located on the ground floor, just make sure you get a ticket for the queue, sometimes there can be a few people waiting but the queue goes pretty quick.

Once you get attended to, you will need to give the above note to the person at the desk (adding pro favor and gracias) and give either the “Family Book” or the identification of your child, you may also need to present your own id again.

If you dont know what a “Family Book” is, this is what one looks like below. We got ours after our daughter was born and we had to go and register our daughter at another office in Marbella where they gave us the Family book. So I am not sure 100% if you can get one if you simply register on the padron BUT logic suggests that if your child is registered on the padron then there should be no problems.

The is the Family Book.

When I requested the certificates, I just presented the note my wife gave me, the family book and my dni card. Probably if you dont have a family book, then you will present the dni of your child (our daughter does not have a dni card yet, but its important to get your child one asap because you cant do much with the family book, for example, I was told today that I could not open a bank account for our daughter with just the family book, she needs to have her own dni card but this is a story for another day)

DNI CARD = National ID Card for Spain or piece of paper showing you are registered in Spain.

So once the lady confirmed that I can get the certificates she told me that I would need to pay the fees for them which are €2 each and told me to nip up to the second floor.

So I went to the second floor and to the cashiers office, presented my note from my wife, the cashier lady asked me for the €4, gave me a receipt after which I zipped downstairs again and my certificates were ready.

This is what the certificates look like. (click on it to see a larger version).

Its not over yet, the next step is for my wife to go and register Olivia, but I just got a text from my wife saying “I dont think we will be able to enrol her because apparently people were queuing at the registration office for the courses since 7am”.

LOL