Civil Wedding, Symbolic Ceremony and Paperwork: How to Get Married in Tenerife

In Spain, legally, only one type of marriage exists: civil marriage. Any wedding with legal validity — "religious" or not — must first go through the marriage file (expediente matrimonial), the mandatory administrative step before any wedding with legal effect. Whether it's later celebrated before a justice of the peace or council official, before a notary, or before an authorised religious officiant for weddings with civil effects, the file is the same prior step.

A symbolic ceremony, on the other hand, has no legal validity on its own: it's the ritual, script and location the couple chooses — a garden, an estate, the shore — free from the restrictions of the Civil Code. It's very common in Spain to separate the two: getting legally married "in small," with few witnesses, at the courthouse, town hall or notary's office, and keeping the symbolic ceremony as the centrepiece of the wedding day, with complete freedom over script and setting.

The legal civil ceremony, by contrast, follows a script set out by law: it includes reading articles of the Civil Code on marriage, asking both parties for their consent, and the official declaration of marriage. It's less flexible than a symbolic ceremony, which is why many couples keep it for the paperwork and save the symbolic ceremony for the day they actually want to celebrate with their guests.

Marriage-file timelines vary a lot depending on the specific Civil Registry office and its workload: figures you'll find range from 15-45 days to 30-75 days, so treat it as an order of magnitude, not a fixed date, and confirm directly with the Civil Registry or notary in your municipality. Going through a notary tends to be more predictable: the notary is assigned within 3-5 working days, and the full file is completed in 15-30 days if the paperwork is in order — around 30-45 days in total.

Because of this variability, the usual recommendation is to start the paperwork 3 to 6 months before the wedding. And once the file is approved, the couple has one year to hold the wedding before it expires and the process has to start over — so it's not worth starting too far in advance either.

The marriage-file timeline and the estate's booking calendar are two different things, and it's worth not mixing them up. For a Saturday in high season, the most sought-after estates in the Canary Islands tend to fill up 12-18 months in advance — a figure that comes from wedding forums and industry guides rather than an official statistic, so always confirm it by calling directly.

At Hacienda Verde, for instance, we recommend booking ahead, especially if your date falls in September: it's one of our most requested months, and we suggest giving around 12 months' notice.

Northern Tenerife has a different climate from the south: greener, cooler and considerably wetter — it accounts for around 73% of the island's total rainfall. In La Orotava, the average temperature is around 16.8°C, typically ranging from 13 to 25°C: the warmest days arrive in August (around 25°C) and the coolest in February (around 18°C). Rainfall is concentrated mostly in December, the wettest month, while July is by far the driest.

For an outdoor ceremony, the windows we usually recommend are April-June and September-November: good temperatures, infrequent rain, and none of the summer's tourist crowds yet. July and August aren't recommended, due to strong heat and the risk of calima — wind carrying Saharan dust — and winter, roughly October to April, is the wettest season in the north, with an average of around 10 days of rain a month. At Hacienda Verde, that lines up with the season we recommend most for events: May to October.