Why the licence has no exam (and why the PER does)
The question almost always arrives with suspicion: if there is no exam, is it really worth anything? It is, and the reason is not that it is easier, but that somebody else answers for the qualification.
Qualifications · · 4 min read
Two mechanisms, not two levels of difficulty
With the PER and the PNB, the assessor is the government: there is an official syllabus, an exam with sitting dates and fees, and a board that decides. The school prepares you, but it does not certify you.
With the Licencia de Navegación — Spain's entry-level boating licence — the mechanism is different. The rules set the programme —two hours of theory and four of practical work— and put the authorised school in charge of checking that the student has completed it. The school issues the licence under its own responsibility, and that responsibility is literal: it answers for every licence it signs.
What “under its own responsibility” means
That the school's own authorisation is at stake. A school issuing licences to people who have not done the practical hours is not risking one student's fail: it is risking the authorisation that lets it exist at all.
That is why the absence of an exam does not make the course any shorter. Four hours of practical work are four hours, with the student at the helm, and the uncomfortable part of the instructor's job is exactly that: deciding whether somebody has learnt enough to take a boat 2 nautical miles from shore.
And why the sentence cannot be stretched
It is worth being precise about this, because it gets passed around badly: the “no exam” applies only to the Licencia de Navegación. The PNB and the PER require an official government exam, and anyone offering you either of those two qualifications without an exam is telling you something that is not true.
It is the kind of nuance nobody notices until somebody pays for a course believing they will walk away with a PER in a weekend.
The course, in case you got this far
All of this is the small print of a six-hour course in a single day, in the Port of Blanes: two hours of in-person theory and four of practical on board. The school is awaiting authorisation, so today there are no course dates and no published price.
Questions about this
If there is no exam, is the licence worth less?
It is worth exactly what the rules say: handling motor boats up to 6 m in length, 2 nautical miles from shore and in daylight, anywhere in Spain. It is not a second-class qualification, it is a qualification with fewer entitlements and a different certification mechanism.
Can you fail the course?
There is no mark, but there is a criterion: the school issues the licence if the student has completed the programme. If somebody is not there yet, the honest thing is to repeat the practical hours, and that is what is done.
Can the PER be obtained without an exam too?
No. The PER and the PNB have an official government exam, with their own sitting dates and fees. The “no exam” belongs to the Licencia de Navegación alone.
We open soon. We'll tell you as soon as there's a date
The school is awaiting authorisation: today there are no places, no course dates and no final price. Leave us your email and you'll be among the first to know. If you'd rather ask, a real person answers on WhatsApp.