A British couple in their seventies, settled near Málaga for over a decade, once told us they had never worried about making a Will in Spain. If anything happened to one of them, the other would simply inherit the house, the savings, everything. It seemed too obvious to need a document. It is one of the most common assumptions we hear from retirees relocating to Spain, often via the Non-Lucrative Visa, and one of the least accurate.
What actually happens without a Will
Under the Spanish common Civil Code, if there is no Will, children and other descendants inherit first, not the spouse. If there are no descendants, the estate passes to parents and other ascendants. Only where there are neither does a spouse inherit outright, ahead of more distant relatives. What a spouse typically holds instead is a usufruct: the right to use and benefit from part of the estate, not to own it. For a couple who have spent years together assuming the spouse would simply receive everything, that gap is worth confronting directly.
There is no single inheritance law in Spain
Here is what tends to surprise even well-prepared clients. Spain has no single set of succession rules. Catalonia, the Basque Country, Navarra, the Balearic Islands, Galicia and Aragón each maintain their own civil-law systems, with their own version of forced heirship, or legítima, and, in several cases, their own rules on what a spouse is entitled to by default.
A retiree settled outside Alicante and one settled a couple of hours up the coast in Catalonia are not necessarily protected, or exposed, in the same way, even though both would describe themselves simply as “living in Spain.” Nor are the rules decided by where a property sits. They follow habitual residence, so two retirees who each own a home in Spain can still fall under different regional laws depending on where they were actually based.
In our experience, this is the detail that catches people out. They research Spanish inheritance law in general terms, find a reassuring answer, and never check whether the region they have actually settled in follows the common rules or a regional variant of its own.
Why this is fixable, and usually isn’t fixed
None of this needs to be left to chance. Under the EU Succession Regulation, individuals can choose the law of their own nationality to govern their estate, rather than the law of wherever they happen to live. This option is open to anyone resident in Spain or holding assets there, not only EU citizens. For a foreign retiree, that sidesteps the regional patchwork altogether and restores the certainty they assumed they already had.
The catch is that it only works if it is written into a Will. Without one, the estate defaults to whichever regional rules apply where the person was actually based.
The same blind spot extends beyond the house
Once this is on the table, it tends to open up two smaller but genuinely useful questions that clients rarely think to ask on their own.
Spanish law lets parents name, in a Will, who they would want to care for a minor child if the child were left without either parent. That appointment still goes through a mandatory court process, but the court takes the parents’ stated wishes into account. This matters considerably for families whose closest relatives are often scattered across two or three countries rather than living nearby.
Pets raise a smaller version of the same question. A pet cannot inherit under Spanish law, but a Will can still name who takes responsibility for its care, which is worth a line in the document for retirees with pets.
Neither point is what someone typically searches for when they think about “inheritance law.” That is precisely why both tend to get missed.
Worth confirming, not assuming
A Spanish Will is not mandatory, and plenty of estates are settled without one. Nor does making one cancel a Will already in place elsewhere. A Spanish Will can be limited to Spanish assets and coexist with a Will made in someone’s home country, rather than replacing it.
What matters is not leaving the answer to assumption, or to which town someone happened to retire to. A short, clearly drafted Will, naming the chosen law and covering Spanish assets, settles in advance a question that otherwise depends on geography most retirees never think to check. For a couple who have built a life together in Spain, that is a smaller piece of paperwork than it sounds.
This is what we do at Global Citizen Solutions. We help clients understand which law would apply to their estate and what their options are, and we prepare a Spanish Will covering their Spanish assets, coordinated with any Will they already hold elsewhere.