Legal & mortgage support

Spanish practice separates jobs that in other countries sit with a single adviser, and the separation is what foreign buyers most often miss. The abogado is retained by you and is partisan: your interests, your instructions, your file. The notario is a public official who authorises the deed and who, in the words of the profession’s own council, must advise both parties impartially and satisfy himself that what is being signed is lawful. The registrador inscribes what has been signed and publishes what the property carries. A gestoría handles administrative filings — by that profession’s own definition, the procedures that do not require the legal technique reserved to lawyers. Four roles, four different duties, and only the first of them owes you loyalty.

It is worth being exact about the notary, because the office is routinely mistaken for an adviser. A Spanish notary is at once an official of the State and a practising lawyer working in competition with other practising lawyers, and the escritura pública — the public deed — that he authorises carries authenticity, enforceability and legality: administrations and courts treat what it records as true. What the notary will not do is act for you. Impartial advice is not advocacy. Nobody at that table is testing the seller’s account, reading the minutes of the comunidad de propietarios, or asking whether an asking price survives contact with what the register actually says. That work belongs to your own lawyer, and it happens weeks earlier.

Most cross-border purchases are signed by somebody who is not in the room. A poder is a public document authorised by a notary that appoints a representative to act in your name, and you can grant one in Spain, before a Spanish consul abroad, or before a notary at home and then legalise it with the Hague apostille that certifies the document’s authenticity. Two practical points follow. Bound it: a special power limited to this purchase, this property and these acts is a smaller instrument to hand over than a general one. And remember it stays yours — the grantor is in principle free to revoke a poder at any time, and the revocation is itself a notarial act rather than a letter.

A non-resident mortgage file is judged on income earned elsewhere, taxed elsewhere and often paid in another currency, so the documentary burden is heavier than a resident borrower’s and the lead time longer. The valuation is not the bank’s opinion of the house. It is a tasación, a regulated exercise under Orden ECO/805/2003, and it may only be issued by a valuation company entered in the Banco de España’s special register. The valuer works from the registered and cadastral description. The loan is therefore measured against the recorded house rather than the one a buyer walks through, and where those two have drifted apart it is a legal problem before it is a lending one.

Spanish mortgage law then imposes a calendar of its own, and it is the single most useful thing a foreign borrower can know. Under Ley 5/2019 the lender must put the standardised European information sheet, the standardised warnings sheet, the draft contract and — on a variable rate — a set of instalment scenarios into the borrower’s hands at least ten calendar days before signature. Inside that window the borrower appears before a notary of their own choosing, no later than the day before the deed, for an act the statute says carries no notarial fee at all. As the law stands in August 2026 this is not a courtesy the bank extends: the notary has to confirm it happened before the loan may be authorised.

The last stretch is a list, and the list is the lawyer’s. A fresh nota simple — the registry extract naming the owner and the charges — dated the day of signing, because the position can move between the arras deposit contract and the deed. The seller’s certificate of the state of their community payments, which Ley 49/1960 obliges the transferor to produce at that moment; an incoming owner answers for the unpaid part of the current year and the three calendar years before it. The energy performance certificate required under Real Decreto 390/2021. The last IBI receipt, the local property tax, and the community’s minutes. None of it is exotic. All of it is something a notary will record and not chase.

Almost everything above is national, and none of it moves when you move along the coast. The Código Civil governs the contract of sale and the deposit that binds it. The escritura, the notarial profession, the Registro de la Propiedad and the publicity it gives through a nota simple are national institutions. So is the mortgage regime: Ley 5/2019 imposes the same reading period and the same free notarial act on a lender in a fishing town and a lender in a capital city. A lawyer qualified anywhere in Spain can answer these questions, and the answer will be the same one.

The tax layer is not national. Transfer tax on a resale, and the stamp duty that accompanies IVA on a new-build, are set by the autonomous community and administered by its own tax agency, which is why a rate quoted on any web page — including one quoted confidently by a portal — carries a shelf life that the page itself never mentions. The structure is stable and the number is not. Have your lawyer confirm the current position in writing before you commit to a purchase, and treat any figure you were given earlier as an assumption rather than as a fact.

Below that sits the municipal layer, and it is genuinely local: the plusvalía settled on a sale, the IBI raised against the property, the building and occupancy licences, the town hall’s own record of works, and the judicial district whose court would hear a dispute about the house. All of it changes with the municipality where the property sits, and none of it can be written once for the whole coast without becoming wrong somewhere. That is why it is written area by area instead. The linked list below is that layer, one municipality at a time.