Wills, inheritance and your Spanish property: sorting it properly.

Nobody buys a holiday home thinking about probate, which is why so many families end up doing Spanish probate the hard way. An hour of planning at purchase time removes almost all of it.

The EU rule that helps Irish owners

Spain has forced-heirship rules: by default, Spanish succession law reserves fixed shares of an estate for children. That alarms Irish owners used to leaving everything to a spouse. The fix is the EU Succession Regulation: you can choose, in your will, for the law of your nationality (Irish law) to govern your estate. One clause, properly drafted, and Irish succession law follows your Spanish apartment. Irish law is not unlimited freedom either: a spouse or civil partner has a legal right share (one third, or half if there are no children), and children can apply to court if not properly provided for.

Why a separate Spanish will

Your Irish will can technically cover Spanish assets, but in practice a Spanish will for the Spanish property makes everything faster and cheaper for your heirs: signed before a Spanish notary, registered centrally, in Spanish legal form, and limited expressly to Spanish assets so the two wills never tread on each other. Cost: modest, usually far less than the probate problems it prevents, and often arranged in the same season as completion while the power of attorney and NIE machinery is already running.

The tax side, briefly

Spanish inheritance tax is regional, and Andalusia is currently one of the kindest regions: close-family inheritances carry large allowances, meaning many spouse-and-children cases pay little or nothing. Non-resident EU heirs of Andalusian property can generally apply Andalusia's rules too (the return is filed with the state tax agency rather than the Junta), but the rules change with politics, and Irish CAT may apply on the Irish side with credits between the systems. The point at purchase time is not to compute it, just to structure ownership sensibly (whose names go on the deed matters) with one conversation.

The checklist

When you buy: decide the ownership split deliberately, make the Spanish will with the choice-of-law clause, tell your Irish solicitor so the wills align, and keep copies where your family can find them along with the property's document folder from the exit guide. Done once, reviewed rarely, worried about never.