Your result
Spain — Naturalization
Not eligible
Naturalisation is not your next step, and knowing that now saves you the most common wasted year.
Spanish citizenship by residence requires you to have been living in Spain, legally and continuously, immediately before you apply. There is no way to serve that time from abroad, no investor shortcut to it, and no version of it that counts visits, holidays or property ownership. Until you hold a Spanish residence permit, the clock has not started.
So the real question is which permit gets you there, and Spain has several that work. If you work remotely for employers or clients outside Spain, the remote-work visa is one of Europe's more usable ones and time on it counts. If you have a job offer or a profession in demand, there are employment routes, and the labour-market test is waived for occupations on Spain's official shortage list. If a parent or grandparent of yours was Spanish, there is a twelve-month job-search visa reserved for you specifically. If you have savings and do not need to work, the non-lucrative visa exists for exactly that.
Once you hold one of those, the wait depends entirely on your nationality of origin — two years for a large group of countries, ten for everyone else. It is worth checking which applies to you before you choose a permit, because it changes whether this is a two-year plan or a twelve-year one.