En el caso de que un residente en el extranjero traslade su domicilio a otro pais o demarcacion consular debera darse de alta en el Registro de Matricula correspondiente del Consulado de su nueva residencia.

Spain's public health care system at the turn of the century, which had been established by the Law 0f 28 November 1885 and modified by the Royal Decree of 12 January 1904, was characterized by a division between public health and the treatment given to individual health problems.

The National Department of Health dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, took care of such aspects as public sanitation, the environment, food control, preventive measures in cases of infectious or contagious diseases, and health care for those pople suffering from leprosy, tuberculosis and mental illnesses, offering them a network of dispensaries and specialized hospitals. The peripheral, local and provincial administrations built general hospitals to treat the citizens.

In parallel, social insurance began to appear: workers' retirement pensions, disability pensions, common illness and maternity benefits, which were financed by quotas depending on salaries. Its expansion brought about, in 1908, the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Prevision, which coordinated all these types of secutiry.

During the Second Republic there were timid attempts to overcome this dichotomy between Public Health and mutual health care by the promulgation of the Let de Coordinacion Sanitaria of 11 July 1934, and the subsequent creation of the Ministry of Health.

After the Civil War, the nation returned to the system used before the Second Republic, and the Ley de Bases de la Sanidad Nacional approved a public system dependent on the Ministry of the Interior. In 1942, Compulsory Health Insurance (SOE) was created, under the auspices of the Instituto National de Prevision, dependent on the Ministry of Labour, which provided a system of a quota depending on the type of work.

From the 1940s on, the public health care model with hospitals and a network of infirmaries, was hardly modified, althought it assumed new responsibilities. The SOE, conceived as an insurance policy for industrial workers, grew over the course of the next twenty years, to benefit an increasingly larger sector of workers, and increased its coverage from 25% of the total Spanish population in 1944 to 45% in 1963. Paradoxically, only one in ten hospital beds at that time was covered by the SOE.

The existence, together with the SOE of other mutual insurance plans, brought about the restructuring and unification of the system through the Ley de Bases de la Seguridad Social, which began to function in 1967 and gave way to the so-called Social Security Public Health Care System. Coverage was extended to other groups, and in this way the public system achieved a coverage of 84% of the population and 23% of all hospital beds. During this period, more of its own hospitals were built and the existing ones were also expanded at the same time that more doctors were hired, so that in 1975, 76% of them were working for the Social Security System. Coverage of pharmaceutical benefits was also increased, 76% of which if financed publicly.

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