English-speaking Lawyer in Torrevieja

What Brexit did and didn’t change for your Spanish will

Since 2015, EU Regulation 650/2012 has set the default rule for anyone dying resident in Spain: Spanish law applies to their entire estate, wherever the assets sit. Crucially, this regulation has universal scope — it was never limited to EU nationals, and Brexit didn’t remove British residents from its reach. That matters because the same regulation also gives you the right to choose otherwise: through a clause called professio juris, you can state explicitly, in a will made in Spain, that the law of your home country should govern your estate instead.

For British expats, that choice usually means avoiding Spain’s legítima — a forced-heirship rule that reserves a fixed share of an estate for children, regardless of what the will says, and that doesn’t sit well with English expectations of testamentary freedom. The catch is that this choice has to be made deliberately and worded precisely. Plenty of long-term residents either never made it, or made it years ago under a solicitor who’s since retired, with no one keeping an eye on whether the will still reflects their situation.