When we finally decided upon La Palma as our Wedding Destination I was pretty excited but Dom was absolutely over the moon! It’s odd really; when we first started this process I, the born and bred proud Yorkshireman, was quite open to the idea of being married abroad and strangely it was Dom that really wanted a proper Yorkshire wedding. Then half way through we somehow swapped: I really liked some of the Yorkshire venues we’d found but Dom had become more keen to try elsewhere. However with La Palma we’d settled on somewhere we both loved, and the second we decided upon it we were desperate to get cracking with getting everything organised.
At this point we hit something of a problem. Just how the heck do you organise a wedding in a foreign country? We already knew that we didn’t want to hold it at one of the big hotels on the Island and with La Palma being such a small Island there wasn’t really an abundance of wedding planners we could pass the job on to. That wasn’t really our style anyway, we wanted to arrange everything ourselves. Actually, scratch that, Dom wanted to plan everything ourselves, I wanted to go to the pub… Anyway, we discussed the possibilities: Dom’s parents have a holiday apartment in Puerto Naos, one of the nicest parts of the Island and so it seemed sensible that this seaside location should be the base for proceedings. So…with that decided, what are the possible locations for a wedding and reception? Well, clearly that depends on the required capacity…how many guests are we expecting?
And therein lies the problem. We had absolutely no idea how many would be able to come. It would be more expensive than your average wedding after all, and arranging to be away for a whole week would be tricky for many. We didn’t even know how many to invite until we could get over there and think about possible venues, the Island not exactly being packed with large capacity spaces! Also, excited as we were, we had to accept that the whole idea of being married abroad would immediately put a dent in our finances. We decided our best bet was to plan for a restaurant reception, restaurants being about the only large spaces we could think of in the local vicinity. We guessed at most we could probably accommodate around 60… you can read more about the chaos of finding that 60 on this previous diary post! Suffice to say, if you find yourself trying to unofficially invite 60 people to an undisclosed foreign destination with little information to offer other than a vague suggestion that it should be quite sunny, Facebook is your friend!
But to be honest, the reception venue was the least of our worries. Firstly we needed to establish where we could hold the ceremony and just how the legal side of things works! It turns out it’s not exactly an easy thing to find out…
It didn’t start well. Typing “Getting Married in La Palma” into Google brought up, fairly inevitably lots of information about getting married in La Palma Majorca, which I’m sure is extremely useful but is sadly the wrong Island. The second hit was entitled “Prison Talk”. I sincerely hoped this wasn’t connected directly with getting those marriage legalities wrong! A friend suggested I ring the consulate for the Island, a great idea except that, try as I might, I couldn’t find out which the relevant consulate actually was! Was it Spain? Was there an embassy on the tiny Island or elsewhere in the Canaries?? As I had a GCSE in Spanish I was nominated to make some calls. One question remained though… exactly how much Spanish Guitar hold music could one man actually sustain before drowning himself in a sea of San Miguel??
Breaking into my fifth pint and nibbling on some now cold Tapas I finally got to speak to a human being.
“Hola!”
“Erm yes, Hola…er, Buenos Tardes!” (my Spanish was more than a little rusty!)
“¿Cómo puedo ayudarle?”
“Oh, erm I’m English…Soy inglés”
“Oh..I’m sorry.”
She hung up. This was NOT going to be easy!!
Stay tuned to the blog to hear more Wedding Diary Extracts as we clamber to organise our dream wedding abroad!
