Costa Rica Marriage Certificate
The national registry is located in downtown San Jose in Barrio Amon and has the responsibility to record birth, marriage, death in Costa Rica. It’s a part of the electoral court and is also where Costa Rican citizens receive their cedula or national identity card.
While it is relatively easy to Get married in Costa Rica it can take several months to record the marriage and receive your marriage certificate. This can be a problem because formal certification is necessary in order to start the process of Applying for Permanent Residency.
Did The Attorney Do It Correctly?
Your attorney is required to report the marriage to registry within 72 hours of recording the marriage in their protocol book. You should call the attorney a few days later and ask for the receipt from the registry, which is a signed form on legal size duplicate paper. This document is nothing special, but it’s something to keep along with a certified copy of the marriage resolution.
You can check up on the attorney through the registry website provided that your spouse is a Costa Rican citizen. Just do a search on her cedula number, and when you look at her record you should see a notation that there is something in process. If this notation doesn’t appear in a few days then there might be something wrong.
Inside the Registry
You should send your Costa Rican spouse to the registry after a month in order to make polite inquiries. As I quickly learned that sometimes in Costa Rica you need to go and ask for things to get done. Not everything happens automatically even if it should, and being polite but persistent pays off.
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Filed Under: Expat Living
