Two Spanish consular posts cover India, and they do not publish the same list. The Embassy in New Delhi asks for three months of bank statements. The Consulate General in Mumbai asks for six, wants your internal travel reservations alongside the international ones, and sends you to a named list of insurers whose policies it will accept. One country, one visa, two documents to build against — and which one binds you is settled by the state you live in, not by which centre has a free appointment.
Most Spain files that come back for more paperwork went wrong right there, before anyone looked at a single booking.
Your state picks the post. You don’t.
The New Delhi district runs from Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana, Delhi NCR, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh across to Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal, Sikkim, the north-eastern states and the island territories. Mumbai’s consulate takes Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu and Puducherry.
Submission is through a BLS application centre on a booked appointment, taken only on BLS’s own site. Centres sit in Chandigarh, Jalandhar, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi and Puducherry as well as Delhi and Mumbai — but attending one does not move your file: what a centre collects reaches the post that owns your jurisdiction the next working day.
One line sits above all of this on Spain’s own checklist: apply to Spain if Spain is the sole or the main destination of your visit. Four nights in Barcelona followed by five in Paris is a French application, not a Spanish one. Article 5 of the Visa Code settles that by the purpose of the trip first, and by where you sleep longest second.
The four places the two checklists disagree
- Bank statements: last 3 months
- Internal travel reservations: not listed
- Travel medical insurance: €30,000 minimum
- Passport validity: 6 months past departure
- Bank statements: last 6 months
- Internal travel reservations: asked for
- Travel medical insurance: €30,000 + approved list
- Passport validity: 3 months past the stay
A few Mumbai instructions get ignored and should not be. Sign the form in blue ink, and do not staple the file or pad it with documents nobody asked for — the checklist says in as many words to refrain from providing anything beyond what it lists. If you were refused a Schengen visa in the last two years, the refusal notice or a written explanation of it goes in, rather than a gap where one should be.
Spain prints a number where other consulates write “sufficient”
Means of subsistence is usually left to the officer’s judgement. Spain publishes the figure. Its consular network states that for 2026 a visitor must show €122 per person per day, and at least €1,099 where the stay runs to nine days or more. That is a floor every traveller named on the file has to clear, not a target to hit exactly. Where a relative is funding the trip, the sponsor’s statements go in alongside yours with a signed letter of what they are covering and proof of the relationship.
€30,000 is only half the insurance rule
The cover has to be worth at least €30,000, has to answer for repatriation on medical grounds, urgent medical attention and emergency hospital treatment, and has to hold good across the Schengen States for the entire stay. That much is common to every Schengen file. The condition that catches Indian applicants is the second one: Schengen consular posts, Spain among them, work from a fixed list of Indian insurance companies dated 01-02-2018, and that document states plainly that travel medical insurance from Indian insurers outside the list is not accepted for the visa procedure.
The same list sets an age band against each company — full coverage to 55, to 70, to 85, with separate senior plans above the band. A certificate from an approved insurer on the wrong plan for a 74-year-old parent fails on the age, not on the company. So send the ages along with the dates when you ask us for the policy, and put the insurer’s name against that list before you attach any certificate to the file — ours included.
Accommodation covers the Schengen nights, not the Spanish ones
Mumbai’s wording is “hotel accommodation for the duration of the stay in Schengen”. Read it literally; it is meant literally. Hotels booked for Madrid and Barcelona with three unaccounted nights in Lisbon in the middle is an itinerary with a hole in it, and a hole is exactly what gets a file read twice. Every night between the day you land and the morning you fly home needs an address behind it.
Staying with family or friends replaces the hotel booking with a carta de invitación — and this is the piece Indian applicants most often misunderstand. It is not a letter your cousin writes. Your host applies for it at the National Police station covering where they live in Spain, and the police issue it. Spain is equally clear about its limits: it proves you have somewhere to sleep and releases you from no other entry requirement, the money included.
Spain’s own checklist tells you not to buy the ticket
The trip section of the Mumbai list reads: “Flight bookings (roundtrip). Also include internal travel reservations. It is advisable not to buy the air ticket until the visa has been granted.” The consulate is telling you to show the plan without paying for it, which is precisely what a held reservation is.
What we issue is a booking created inside the airline’s reservation system and held under a reference in your name. Nothing is printed that a system cannot confirm.
For a Spain file that usually means a return routing into Madrid or Barcelona, nonstop or via one hub, matched to the city your trip actually starts in. If you are under the Mumbai consulate, the internal legs count too: the AVE down to Seville, the hop across to Palma or Málaga, the train to Valencia. Those are the “internal travel reservations” the checklist means, and they are the first thing to fall out of step when a plan changes.
The window, the fee, and what the border does now
Applications are taken between six months and fifteen days before travel, and Mumbai’s centres will only accept a file whose travel dates fall more than fifteen calendar days after submission. As published on 04-09-2026, the fee is ₹9,599 for an adult and ₹4,799 for a child aged 6–12, plus a BLS service charge of ₹1,802; the rupee amounts follow the exchange rate and the centre states they can change without notice. Mumbai puts its own average processing at one to two working days and says openly that it varies with the case.
At the Spanish border itself the ink stamp has gone. The EU Entry/Exit System has been fully operational across all 29 Schengen countries since 10-04-2026: your face and fingerprints are registered on the first crossing, and the 90-days-in-180 count is computed rather than estimated. There is nothing to apply for beforehand and nothing that changes what goes into the visa file — it only means the record of how you used the visa is now exact.
What to send us
Passport bio page, your travel dates, the cities with the nights against them, and the age of every traveller. Back comes a flight reservation, hotel bookings covering each night of the Schengen stay, and the insurance certificate — with payment arranged in the same WhatsApp chat once the details are confirmed — never card numbers or OTPs typed into a chat. None of it decides the outcome; the consulate weighs the whole application and reaches its own view. What a coherent file does is remove the small contradictions that send an officer back to the beginning of yours.