Dear Spanish customs (Aduanas),
Thank you so much for holding onto my backpack for a month and a half.
Silly me—I just wanted to ship a small box to myself from Switzerland. A few clothes, headphones, and a little backpack: some things to make my life easier after a 10-day hike in Portugal (when I didn’t need much) and before a 3-week program in Valencia.
I paid CHF 51 to ship the box from Zurich to Valencia, to the home of my friend Fred, a Spanish citizen. When they asked for the declared value, I said CHF 300, since the shipping included free insurance up to that amount. No one warned me what might happen next.
According to the tracking number, the box arrived the next day in Spain. Zippy!
And then—nothing.
Thus began my bag’s long stay at AduanasBnB™ (my snarky term of endearment for what is really a hostage situation).
SEVENTEEN days later—long after my Portugal trip had ended, I’d already arrived in Valencia, and I’d been walking around in just a few pairs of hiking clothes for a week—Aduanas wrote to Fred. Since he had “purchased” goods from someone in Switzerland, he would have to pay import duties. A lot of them. But they needed YET MORE TIME to calculate them.
(At no point during this process were we given the option to just pay a fee and release the package; it was being held hostage in an undisclosed location, with a limited, one-way communication portal. Thankfully I didn’t send anything of crucial importance.)
Fred—a busy first-time father of an infant, bless his heart—did some research and responded to Aduanas, explaining that no, he had not purchased anything, but rather received a box that his friend was shipping to himself.
Aduandas responded a few days later, asking for proof of my existence and presence in Spain: travel receipts, lodging receipts, even airplane boarding passes. Then they wanted Fred to declare that this was a gift from me. They they demanded a full breakdown of the value of every item in the box, to calculate its new value. We responded immediately, each time, with full documentation. They responded within days, asking for the exact same documentation again. Bureaucracy ping-pong.
At this point, my stay in Valencia is almost over. Aduanas finally provides a definitive response, declaring the value of my box of “sports clothing” to be €50—but actually the “customs value” is €78.11 (?!?)—on which they will tax me 21%, or €16.40.
But wait, there’s more!
They also charged €21.81 as a “management fee”, €5.18 for “handling”, and another 21% on top of each of those—for a grand total of €49.06.
Which, in total, means that I paid a grand total of ~$120 (USD) to send a box to Spain, let it sit in AduanasBnB™ for a month and a half, spend three weeks walking around Valencia in just my hiking clothes, and finally receive the box when I circled back to Valencia… just one week before I would return to Switzerland, from the same place where I shipped the box in the first place.
Mil gracias, Aduanas, for the swift action and fair pricing. How many civil servant hours were spent on this fruitless process? And Swiss Post, why didn’t you mention that shipping something to Spain would incur duties?
Yes, I should have done my homework. I should have realized that shipping to Spain from a non-EU country (like the UK or Switzerland) activates the customs process. I should have known better. And now I do. And so do you.
If you’re in Europe—but you’re in a non-EU country—do not ship something important to Spain. If you do, declare it to have minimal value. And be prepared to wait a very, very long time to negotiate the release of your hostage.
