We present an effective field theory for doubly heavy baryons that goes beyond the compact heavy diquark approximation. The heavy quark distance r is only restricted to m Q ≫ 1 / r ≫ E bin , where m Q is the mass of the heavy quark and E bin the typical binding energy. This means that the size of the heavy diquark can be as large as the typical size of a light hadron. We start from nonrelativistic QCD, and build the effective field theory at next-to-leading order in the 1 / m Q expansion. At leading order the effective field theory reduces to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The Born-Oppenheimer potentials are obtained from available lattice QCD data. The spectrum for double charm baryons below threshold is compatible with most of the la...