Julia Cejudo, Spain’s youngest notary at 23

Notary at 23: merit, background and a job for life

Some competitive exams take seven years or more to prepare for. Julia Cejudo passed hers at 23. The young woman from Carmona (Seville) thus becomes Spain’s youngest notary, and her case has set half the country arguing over the usual question: whether the system rewards effort or starting point.

The fact is fruta. The meaning is not. Three narratives coexist in the conversation: those who see exemplary discipline, those who see social inheritance disguised as individual merit, and those who simply don’t understand why a notary’s post is still front-page news.

What’s at stake for a notary candidate

Top-level legal competitive exams are described as an exercise in literal memorisation: reciting topics almost word for word before a panel. In the debate itself it is claimed that some candidates string together seven years or more of preparation, many without ever having worked. The bottleneck is not the syllabus; it is time.

That is why passing at 23 is no minor detail. The question is not whether she studied —clearly she did— but how many people with the same ability could not have afforded those years without income. The uncomfortable answer: quite a few.

The price of years without income

In the thread, giving up weekend getaways and travel becomes an argument: some read it as a lesson in perseverance, others as stating the obvious—at 23, until recently, almost no one travelled until they had a job.

The nuance matters. What used to be normal —studying at home and going out little— has become a rarity that requires sustained family funding. And that is news, even if the news is not her.

The mayor, the key to the city and the overblown gesture

The news landed in Carmona with an institutional reception. The mayor, Juan Ávila, received her and publicly highlighted the achievement: “A source of pride for her family, for her friends and for all of Carmona. And an example of effort and perseverance in achieving a dream.”

The gesture did not convince everyone. It is argued that no cure has been discovered and no Olympic medal won, and people joke that in two decades town halls will hand the key to the city to every young person who passes a civil-service exam. The ceremony, they say, portrays the country better than it does the woman being honoured.

Background: what is claimed and what is proven

Here the ground gets slippery. It is claimed that the young woman lives in Carmona’s affluent area, the one with mansions and luxury residential homes, an environment that would make it easier to devote years to study without needing to earn an income. These are assertions without documentary proof: the exam is public and the result is verifiable.

It is also taken for granted, without a shred of evidence, that these processes involve sponsors. When there is no proof, honesty demands saying so: suspicion is not data. And even so, the substance of the issue stands without needing suspicion. A lifetime post rewards those who can devote nearly a decade of their life to it without working.

The cost the citizen ends up paying

The second front of the debate targets not the exam but the profession. Notaries, property registrars and procuradores (court agents) are among the professionals the public cannot avoid when the law requires going through them. The criticism is not new, but the sequence of young notary plus institutional praise has revived it.

The argument is simple to state and hard to refute: if the procedure is mandatory, its price is no longer negotiable. It is argued that this extra cost adds to other fixed burdens —housing, car, work— and ends up eating into access to a home, a car or a contract. It is not that the procedure is unnecessary, they say; it is that the system turns it into a toll.

Notaries vs Nvidia

There lies the deeper criticism, the one least to do with one particular young woman. A continent that rewards the paper-pusher and discourages productive risk. Compared with the ecosystem of Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon or Meta, the domestic ecosystem of success remains the competitive-exam academy and its shiny annual cohort.

It may sound exaggerated until you look at the majority aspiration of a generation: a permanent post, predictable hours and shelter from the cycle. No one is choosing wrong. They choose what the system rewards. The incentive, not the vocation, is what is being discussed here.

Is the profession redundant in the age of automation?

No, at least for now. The harshest criticism is not of access but of function: it is argued that certifying that something has been done could be resolved technically without the structure of professionals that currently monopolises it. Digitalisation has reinforced that suspicion, although no one has presented a complete substitute with the legal guarantees required by a notarial act. For the moment, the post still exists and still commands a price.

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What is striking about the case is not that some people resent the shortcut. It is that her sacrifice —two sentences about weekends and travel— is read as heroism and not as a bill. If the country celebrates this as a dream fulfilled, exactly whose dream is it?