I wanted to find out how to get a pet passport while I was in Palermo, Italy. My next stop after Italy is going to be Spain. Whilst my UK Health Certificate was still valid, I read online that if I was coming from an EU country I needed an EU Pet Passport or a Health Certificate in Spanish. Which I did not have (only in English). I wrote to the authorities in Spain to double check, but in the meantime we started to panic a bit!
I’d read about EU pet passports before and thought it would be quite a simple process of going to a vet. However, after contacting 3 different vets in Palermo, all 3 said they didn’t do them. To be honest, they weren’t very helpful and quite abrupt. I found this to be a pattern when trying to do anything official in Italy as a foreigner.
I wrote to the owner of my Air BnB to see if he had any ideas, as he had a dog. So I thought he may have one. Unfortunatley he didn’t. He did try to assist but he said he could also find very little information online, even in Italian. He even spoke to his regular vet and they siad they weren’t sure either.
This was quite strange for us as Italy is so pet friendly and there are dogs everywhere. So we found it a bit strange that even vets didn’t really know how to get something that should be pretty simple.
Official Vet
I found one website in Italian that seemed to point towards some kind of official vet. So I e-mailed them on vetcanile.anagrafe@asppalermo.org It also had an address on it so we decided to take a walk up to see if we could speak to them in person. We went armed with all our papers, as it wasn’t far from our Air BnB.
The address of the Official Vet is P.tta tiro a segno n.5 Palermo and the telephone number is +39 917037657. We got to the address but there was nothing that we could see that looked anything like an office or anything official. There was one kind of pet store nearby and asked in there but they didn’t know. We ended up walking around the area for about 20 minutes with no luck. No-one was answering the phone either. In the end we headed back to the Air BnB, getting a bit more worried that this was going to be harder than we thought!
Relief
The day after we had been to try to find the Official Vet, we got confirmation from the Spanish authorities that as we had already entered the EU with our UK Health Certificate and this had already been checked by authorities on arrival to the EU, we were fine to enter Spain with this. It didn’t need to be in Spanish and we didn’t need to have an EU Pet Passport! This was such a relief as we didn’t feel like we were getting anywhere with the pet passport.
Process to get EU Pet Passport in Italy
A few days after this, we got a response from the Official Vet in Palermo. They didn’t actually send a response, just this information which is all in Italian;
From a rough Google Translate, it seems like the following steps are required in order to get an EU Pet Passport issued in Palermo;
- You must make an appointment in advance with the Offical Vet at the above e-mail address or phone number
- At the appointment you must take your dog with you along with his ‘data sheet’
- Confirmation of rabies vaccine at least 21 days in advance of the appointment
- You must make payment of €27.54 to the above account in advance
So it seems that it’s actually not that difficult to get a pet passport in Palermo, Italy, but it is certainly only the Official Vet of the city that can issue it.
In the end we didn’t get the EU Pet Passport issued in Italy. Instead we travelled with our UK Health Certificate. But hopefully this information will help someone else who is looking to do the same. Good luck finding the office if you do make the trip, let me know how it goes!
If you want to see what I got up to whilst in Palermo, check out my Youtube channel 🙂
Woof woof, Wylie x
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