Every day, I play the online game Worldle, a geography offshoot of the wildly popular New York Times’s game Wordle. The game gives you a silhouette of a country, and over many rounds you try to guess the country, its border countries, its capital, flag, emblem, population, languages spoken, currency, and land area. It was during one of these games that I first was made to understand that the European Union and the Schengen Area, while having some overlap, were not in fact the same thing! The mystery country that day was Switzerland, and when it came time to choose the currency, I confidently chose the euro. Wrong! Switzerland still uses the Swiss franc. What was this? I had to know more!
While both areas contain many of the countries found in mainland Europe, they are actually two completely different things. It turns out that the Schengen area (so called because the original treaty was signed near a town called Schengen) was created in 1985, when Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed an agreement abolishing border checks between those five countries. The Schengen Zone now comprises 29 European countries. People can travel without additional visas to any of the countries within the Schengen Zone. This makes travel throughout Europe much easier for most travelers. However, if you enter any country in the Schengen Zone on a 90-day tourist visa, then any time spent in any of those 29 countries counts towards your 90 days, In other words, if you are an American traveling on a tourist visa and spend 30 days in Spain, 30 in Portugal and 30 in Italy, you will need to return to the U.S. for 90 days before you can legally enter any Schengen country again. Or you could get a separate visa to one of the 11 countries that are geographically in Europe but aren’t part of the Schengen Agreement: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine, or the United Kingdom.
The European Union, on the other hand, was formed in 1993 as a political and economic union allowing for an internal market for goods, services, and capital among the 27 member states. There are four Schengen countries that are not part of the EU: Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Iceland. So when those come up on Worldle, don’t choose “euro” as their currency!
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