Bilingual and International Schools Near Antigua Guatemala (2026)

If you are moving to Antigua with school-age children, the first useful question is not which school is best — it is which schools actually exist, where the government registers them, and what each one will tell you before you contact them. This page answers those three, school by school, from MINEDUC’s registry of authorised establishments, the accreditation bodies’ own registers, and each school’s own website, all read on 3 September 2026.

A correction we owe you. Earlier versions of this page listed five schools, each with a tuition range and a student count. Three of those schools do not exist under the names we gave them: “Escuela Santiago”, “Casa Montessori Antigua” and “Colegio el Roble (Antigua)”. The full MINEDUC private register for the department of Sacatepequez — 1,373 authorised codigos across all 16 municipios — was pulled and searched, and none of the three is in it. Every tuition range and every student count on the old version was unsourced, including the two attached to schools that are real. All of it is gone. Details are in the section below.

Quick summary

The four schools with a sourced record

All four hold codigos at all four levels (parvulos, primaria, basico, diversificado), and every one of those codigos was ABIERTA in the MINEDUC registry on 3 September 2026.

Antigua International School — registered in Ciudad Vieja

MINEDUC registers it as “COLEGIO ANTIGUA INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL” in Sacatepequez / Ciudad Vieja, Kilometro 74.8 Ruta Nacional 14: codigos 03-12-0045-42 (parvulos), 03-12-0046-43 (primaria), 03-12-0047-45 (basico) and 03-12-0054-46 (diversificado), all open. The school’s own site publishes no street address in text — only map links and the notes that it is “a solo 10 minutos del centro de Antigua” on a “terreno de siete acres” (antiguais.org, read 3 September 2026). The College Board’s AP Course Audit Ledger also files it under Ciudad Vieja, and it is the only Sacatepequez school in that ledger.

Accreditation, confirmed at the body. NEASC’s own directory data file lists Antigua International School, Ciudad Vieja: Accredited, initial evaluation 2016, last evaluated 2020, grades K-12, CIE commission.

Programme. Two tracks, in the school’s words — “Guatemalan families should select the AIS Guatemalan Program, while international families should select the AIS International Program” — with instruction “split equally (50/50) between English and Spanish”, and Advanced Placement coursework. Grades run from Toddlers 1 (18 months) to Grade 12.

Calendar: northern. The school publishes a “SCHOOL CALENDAR 2026 - 2027” and a “NEW FAMILY DAY / SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 2026”, while its Spanish admissions page is headed “Inscripciones 2027”. For a family arriving mid-year, this is the most useful fact on this page.

Size, as the school states it — and where it contradicts itself. Its admissions page publishes “520+ Students”, “37+ NATIONALITIES”, “100+ FACULTY & STAFF” and “≈18 STUDENTS PER CLASS”, with a founding year of 2011. Its FAQ page says something different: “There are 15 nationalities represented, and international students make up 20% of the student body”. We publish both with their pages rather than merging them into one number.

Cost. Tuition is not published. The only figure anywhere on the site is the non-refundable “Application Fee / Q400 – $50”.

Admission documents, as the school lists them for international students:

• “Recent digital photo”
• “Birth certificate”
• “Parents’ DPI/passport”
• “Vaccination record”
• “Most recent report card and the last two completed grade levels”
• “Solvency letter from the current school”

The MINEDUC and KIES paperwork block on the same page is explicitly labelled as applying only to applicants coming from Guatemalan schools. AIS publishes no apostille and no equivalencia requirement for a child arriving from abroad. Also published: “Antigua International School does not offer transportation service.”

Antigua Montessori School — the area’s IB Diploma school, also in Ciudad Vieja

Full school page, re-read on 2 October 2026 with its IB subject list and MINEDUC history: Antigua Montessori School.

The IB’s own register lists Antigua Montessori School as an IB World School offering the Diploma Programme, languages English and Spanish, at km 52 Carretera a San Miguel Duenas, Ciudad Vieja, Sacatepequez — an IB school since 20 December 2024, coeducational, day, sitting the MAY exam session (ibo.org school 063597, read 3 September 2026). MINEDUC registers it as “CENTRO EDUCATIVO ANTIGUA MONTESSORI”, Ciudad Vieja, Kilometro 52 — codigos 03-12-0068-42, 03-12-0069-43, 03-12-0088-45 and 03-12-0122-46, all open.

It moved. The older registrations under the Antigua Guatemala municipio are closed — CERRADA DEFINITIVAMENTE or CERRADA TEMPORALMENTE. If you have been looking for a Montessori school inside Antigua itself, this is the school you were looking for, and it is now in Ciudad Vieja.

The IB register is ahead of the school’s own website. The homepage still describes IB accreditation as a process it began — “Iniciamos proceso de acreditación en octubre” — while the IB has listed the school as authorised since December 2024. Ask the school directly which cohort the Diploma applies to.

Programme, quoted from the school: “Preescolar - 4 Primaria / Montessori / Certificado bajo el International Montessori Council (IMC)” · “5° Primaria - 3° Básico / Young Scholars for Innovation and Entrepreneurship / Programa preparatorio para el Bachillerato Internacional” · “4° - 5° Bachillerato / Bachillerato Internacional”. The International Montessori Council certification is a claim on the school’s own site; no public IMC directory could be found to confirm it, so treat it differently from the IB listing, which is confirmed on the IB’s register.

Languages. The IB records English and Spanish; the school calls itself a “colegio bilingüe e internacional” and specifies “40% español y 60% inglés” for science in 3ro-4to primaria.

Cost: not published — no figure in any currency anywhere on the site. The only route to a price is the school’s visit-request form. Contact published by the school: +502 7834-0284, info@antiguamontessori.edu.gt. Its foreign-child document list, founding year and enrolment are not published either.

Antigua Green School — the one registered inside Antigua

MINEDUC registers it in Antigua Guatemala, Calle del Portal lote 11 — codigos 03-01-0276-42, 03-01-0277-43, 03-01-0279-45 and 03-01-0280-46, all open. The school instead describes its campus as sitting on a “70-acre coffee farm called Finca La Azotea”, “on the north side of Antigua”, and publishes no street address. Those two descriptions do not obviously match; we report each with its source rather than reconciling them for you.

Curriculum, in the school’s words: a “PreK - 12 school registered with the Guatemalan Ministry of Education” whose secondary programme “fuses the Guatemalan CNB and Cambridge international standards”, with Cambridge Checkpoint, IGCSE and an optional A-Level alongside the Guatemalan diploma.

The school also describes itself as the “only recognized Cambridge International School in Guatemala” — we could not verify that. Cambridge International’s own school finder did not render a searchable list when we checked (the site was showing a service-disruption banner), so this stays on the page as the school’s claim about itself, not as a confirmed fact. It is worth asking the school for the authorisation detail, because if it is true it is the school’s entire differentiator.

Languages. The school advertises “a true BILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT with dual immersion English/Spanish classrooms”. Note that MINEDUC lists all four of its codigos as MONOLINGUE — that field is applied inconsistently across the register and should not be read as a statement about English instruction either way.

Cost: not published. There are no currency figures anywhere on the school’s site. Figures for this school do circulate in search results, but they come from a third-party listing aggregator rather than the school — do not budget from them.

History, as published. Founded in 2010 by Bryant Hand, moved to La Azotea in 2014, with Joan Fuetsch joining as a partner in 2018. Parts of the site are stale: some community pages still carry “Cancelled due to COVID19” notices. Admissions contact published: info@antiguagreenschool.edu.gt.

Colegio Boston Bilingue — bilingual, not international, and it moved too

This is a real school and the only one of the four running the Guatemalan national curriculum with a bilingual programme — but it is not an international school, and it is no longer registered in Antigua town. MINEDUC places it in Ciudad Vieja (Aldea San Lorenzo El Cubo): codigos 03-12-1185-42, 03-12-1186-43, 03-12-1187-45 and 03-12-1188-46, all open, while the old Antigua-town codigos are CERRADA DEFINITIVAMENTE. Its own footer gives “Aldea San Lorenzo El Cubo, Kilómetro 77.2, Ruta Nacional 14, Sacatepéquez” and signs off “© 2026 Colegio Boston Bilingüe, Antigua Guatemala”.

Curriculum. The Guatemalan MINEDUC curriculum with a bilingual programme. No US, IB, AP or Cambridge curriculum and no foreign accreditation is claimed anywhere on its site. What it does publish are add-ons: robotics, Junior Achievement, Progrentis, a December exchange to York, England (Dusemond Study Programmes), and a teacher exchange with the University of North Texas and SMU.

Calendar: the Guatemalan January-start cycle, evidenced by its own recruiting dates — “FECHAS DE ADMISIONES PARA EL CICLO ESCOLAR 2026: 07 y 26 de Agosto; 16 y 18 de Septiembre; Del 02 al 30 de Octubre; Del 04 al 19 de Noviembre” — i.e. the 2026 school year is recruited during the second half of 2025.

Cost. Tuition is not published; the price arrives as an information kit from the admissions department. The two figures it does publish are “Costo del examen de Admisión 2026: Q150.00” and “El proceso de admisión en Preprimaria no tiene costo”. Founded February 1984; enrolment not published.

Nobody here publishes a price

That is the honest headline. Across the four schools, the only published figures are Antigua International School’s Q400 / US$50 application fee and Colegio Boston Bilingue’s Q150.00 admission exam. Tuition itself is quoted on enquiry at all four.

This is not a gap in our research — it is what the market does. Of roughly 35 schools examined at first-party sources across Guatemala for this dataset, five publish a real tuition figure, and none of those five is in Sacatepequez. Any Antigua tuition range you find on an aggregator or a listicle was not read off a school’s website, because the numbers are not on those websites.

Enrolling a foreign child: what MINEDUC requires

Four things about this process are commonly stated wrongly — including on earlier versions of our own pages. All of the below comes from MINEDUC’s instructivo ACR-INS-01, Versión 5 (the version MINEDUC publishes; the file was last modified at source on 27 September 2024, and we read it on 4 September 2026) and from DIGEACE’s own process pages.

1. The word is equiparacion. Versión 5 defines equiparación de estudios as “el proceso que permite el reconocimiento de estudios realizados en el extranjero para la incorporación del estudiante en el Sistema Educativo Nacional, al grado inmediato superior al último aprobado”. Equivalencia is the internal process for comparing two study plans inside the national system, and homologación is the university-degree word. Ask for the wrong one and you are sent to the wrong queue. MINEDUC grants equiparaciones to students entering the country legally, to “retornados o estudiantes familiares del Cuerpo Diplomático Nacional o Extranjero” — and Versión 5 defines that first group: “Para efectos de este instructivo, es la persona guatemalteca que regresa al país, después de estudiar en el extranjero. El regreso puede ser voluntario o forzado.”

2. The apostille can be waived for returnees — it is discretionary, so ask before you pay. Nota 2 of Versión 5, verbatim: “El requisito de apostilla puede exonerarse a estudiantes retornados y a los indicados en el artículo 20 del Acuerdo Ministerial 1753-2019, con la finalidad de facilitar la inserción en el SEN.” Read that word carefully: puede exonerarse — it can be waived, at MINEDUC’s discretion, not automatically. Do not assume the exemption and do not assume the apostille either: ask the Dirección Departamental de Educación that will handle your file, before you pay for apostilles you may not need.

3. Sworn translation applies to one document, not the whole file. From the Versión 5 requirements list: “Traducción jurada del documento que respalde el último grado aprobado o en curso, únicamente si el idioma de la documentación no es español.”

4. The school must enrol the child meanwhile, and the tramite is free. Nota 4 of Versión 5: “Las autoridades de los centros educativos están obligadas a asegurar la incorporación al SEN y la inscripción al grado y nivel correspondiente al solicitante” — and it says when: “mientras finalice el proceso y se emita la resolución correspondiente.” A family arriving without identity paperwork “tendrá un máximo de 3 meses para completarla”, under artículo 12 of Acuerdo Ministerial 1753-2019. On cost: “Todos los trámites del presente instructivo serán gratuitos en todas las instancias y entidades bajo la rectoría del Ministerio de Educación donde se realicen”, and the official trámite listing prices it at Q 0.

How it is filed. The request goes in on MINEDUC’s BPM platform, bpm.mineduc.gob.gt, using form ACR-FOR-01, “Solicitud de equiparación de estudios”. The departmental directorate then verifies the file “en un máximo de 3 días hábiles”.

Where documents are missing, preprimaria and primaria placement is by age; basico and diversificado placement is by a test covering “de las áreas de Ciencias Naturales y Matemáticas” only, and “Las pruebas se realizarán en el idioma español o inglés según las necesidades del estudiante”.

The governing regulation is Acuerdo Ministerial No. 1753-2019 of 18 June 2019. Primary sources: instructivo ACR-INS-01 Versión 5 (PDF), DIGEACE’s equiparaciones page and the Catalogo de Tramites entry.

→ Our full walkthrough: MINEDUC study equivalency and equiparacion.

Which calendar a school runs is a legal category, not a guess

MINEDUC authorises a separate class of school — “Centros Educativos Privados autorizados para trabajar con plan internacional” — and issues that class its own school-year acuerdo, separate from the public and the private/cooperativa/municipal calendars. The current one is Acuerdo Ministerial No. 3149-2026, “Establecer el calendario escolar 2026-2027 para Centros Educativos Privados autorizados para trabajar con plan internacional”, published in the Diario de Centro America on 15 July 2026 and in force from 16 July 2026.

Two practical notes. First, the acuerdo sets a framework, not each school’s dates: MINEDUC’s own school-calendar page now lists AM 3149-2026 next to the public (AM 4817-2025) and private (AM 4818-2025) calendars (checked 2 October 2026), but an international-plan school’s exact first and last days still have to come from the school. (Corrected 2 October 2026: this note used to say MINEDUC’s calendar page did not list AM 3149-2026.) Second, in the Antigua area the split is real: Antigua International School publishes a 2026-2027 northern calendar, Antigua Montessori sits the May IB session, and Colegio Boston Bilingue recruits for a January start. Ask each school for its calendar before you book flights.

Three schools this page used to list

Two further entries that come up in Antigua school searches and are not options for this audience: Nuevo Amanecer, which has zero matches in the Sacatepequez register, and Escuela Integrada, which is real — registered as “ESCUELA INTEGRADA DE NIÑOS TRABAJADORES” — but is a free school for working children supported by an NGO, with its Antigua codigos closed and its open ones in Jocotenango.

Also in Sacatepequez, and not yet researched

Two more Sacatepequez schools are in the register with an address and nothing else we can stand behind yet. We name them so you can call them, and we make no curriculum, size or fee claim for either:

• Colegio Valle Americano — San Lucas Sacatepequez. Its own site claims “textos y currículo norteamericano” and “más de 15 años”, but the site is a half-finished template carrying placeholder body copy, so we are not treating anything on it as sourced.
• Colegio Bilingue Intellego — Santiago Sacatepequez, Lote 333 Jardines de Santiago. Guatemalan bachillerato, not a foreign curriculum.

For context on how thin the field is: sweeping the live MINEDUC registry for open private schools whose registered name carries an international signal returns 14 in the whole department of Sacatepequez — and a name is not a curriculum. Four have a record complete enough to publish.

Where the nearest options are if Antigua does not fit

If none of the four fits — the only IB programme in the group is the Diploma, at one school, and none of the four publishes a price you can plan against — the nearest concentration of internationally accredited schools is Guatemala City and its metro ring. Five of Guatemala’s six IB World Schools are in the capital, its metro ring or Fraijanes; five of the six AASCA member schools in the country are too; and of the four Guatemalan schools in NEASC’s directory, two are in the capital area and a third is Antigua International School above.

International schools in Guatemala City →

Worth knowing before you consider moving further out: several parts of Guatemala have no international option at all. Peten (Flores, Santa Elena, San Benito) has none, and the nearest real option is Guatemala City, eight to nine hours away. Izabal has none. Retalhuleu, Puerto San Jose and Monterrico have none; the only coastal option is at Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa. Around Lake Atitlan there is nothing in San Pedro La Laguna, Santiago Atitlan or Solola town — the lake’s international school is in Panajachel and publishes that it draws students from all of them. Measured against that, Sacatepequez is well served.

How this page was checked

Every school here was verified against MINEDUC’s registry of authorised establishments, which returns codigo, level, address, director and operating status per school per level — which is how we know which registrations are open and which schools changed municipio. Accreditations were confirmed on the accrediting body’s own list where one exists: the IB’s school register, NEASC’s own directory data file, and the College Board’s AP Course Audit Ledger. Everything else is quoted from the school’s own website with the date we read it. Where a school publishes nothing, this page says so instead of estimating.

Registry, accreditation and school-site checks: 3 September 2026. Fees and calendars change — confirm with the school before you commit.