Spain · The material

The official CCSE manual: free, renewed every January, and it is the exam itself

The Instituto Cervantes publishes the manual the questions come from, at no charge, and replaces part of it each year. That makes the CCSE one of the few citizenship tests in Europe where the study material and the question pool are the same thing.

Free to downloadRenewed each January25 % new in 2026

7 days free, then 34,99 € a year.

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What the manual is, and what it is not

Most citizenship tests in Europe publish a syllabus and leave you to find material that covers it. Spain does the opposite. The Instituto Cervantes publishes the Manual de preparación de la prueba CCSE, free, and the questions on the paper come out of it.

So the manual is not a study guide that approximates the test. It is the pool. Working through it is not preparation for the exam in the loose sense; it is preparation in the literal one, and there is no second, secret source a paid course could sell you access to.

That is also why every honest practice site, this one included, has to be clear about what it is. Practice questions written by anyone other than the Instituto Cervantes are practice on the same material, in the same shape. They are not the questions.

The yearly renewal, and why the year on the cover matters

The manual is republished each year and the new edition takes effect in January.
The Instituto Cervantes says the 2026 contents and questions are the ones used in every sitting from January 2026.
It also says the 2026 edition renewed 25 per cent of its questions against the 2025 edition.
A quarter is a large share. Studying from a manual a year out of date means a quarter of what you learned is no longer in the pool.
The manual is free. The Instituto Cervantes publishes it for download on its own preparation page.
The pool is 300 questions. Announcing a new manual, the Instituto Cervantes wrote that it had modified 75 of the 300, which is a quarter, the same proportion it gives for 2026.
The paper draws 25 of those 300, so roughly one question in twelve of what you study will be on the day's paper.

What to do about the quarter that changed

The Instituto Cervantes publishes the new manual. It does not publish a list of which questions were replaced, so there is no shortcut that tells you which quarter to re-read.

The practical answer is the boring one: work from the current edition rather than from notes, a course pack or a PDF someone shared. If you are sitting in 2026, the 2026 manual is the only edition that describes the paper you will get, and it costs nothing to download.

It also means a set of practice questions is only as current as the manual it was written from. Belong Spain's questions are written from the contents of the official manual and are updated when it is, and the date on this page is when a person last checked that against the Instituto Cervantes' own page.

Where Belong Spain's questions come from

Written by Belong Spain from the contents of the official manual, grouped under the manual's own five tareas and in the manual's order. They are not the Instituto Cervantes' questions and they can contain mistakes. The real sitting draws its 25 from the manual, which you can download for free, and that manual is the thing to study.

There are 450 practice questions in the app.

450questions, drilled tarea by tarea in the order the Instituto Cervantes’ manual sets them, with a mistakes deck, spaced repetition and a mock in the real paper’s shape: 25 questions in 45 minutes, and a real apto or no apto, because all twenty-five come from one published manual.

Written by Belong Spain from the contents of the official manual. They are not the Instituto Cervantes’ questions, and the real sitting uses its own.

7 days free, then 34,99 € a year.

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More on the CCSE

See all Spanish nationality requirements

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