Spain comes up early whenever Canadians start pricing out a place in Europe. It has the sun, the beaches, a healthcare system that consistently outranks ours, an established Anglophone expat infrastructure on every major coast, and prices that still look reasonable next to Toronto or Vancouver. It is the second most popular destination in this series after Mexico for good reason. But “sunny, cheap, and full of Canadians already” is not a strategy, and Spain has spent the last eighteen months rewriting the rules around rental property, taxation, and foreign investment – which means the version of Spain your neighbour bought into in 2019 is not the one on offer now.

This post is the country introduction, not the regional guide. It will not make you an expert on any single coastline – Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca will each earn their own deep dive, and I will link them here as they publish. What this post does is give you the framework: where Canadians actually buy and why, how ownership legally works when there is no trust and no restricted zone to worry about, how financing really functions for a non-resident, what the short-term rental clampdown of the last two years means for a rental thesis, what the taxes look like on both the Spanish and Canadian sides, and how safe the place actually is. By the end you will know enough to ask the right questions instead of the obvious ones. Spain is one of the markets I keep circling back to when I think about a second real estate investment.