If You Love Your Next of Kin, Don’t Die in Spain: Thomas Ekvall

I had always understood that bureaucracy in Spain could be, shall we say, a bit elaborate. Not inefficient, just fond of its own company. That is why an entire cadre of professionals exists here: the “fixers.” Mine is of Indian origin, arrived as a teenager, and never left. He now spends his days helping well-heeled Spaniards navigate their own administration, which they prefer not to engage with themselves. Even the natives, it seems, approach their bureaucracy the way one approaches a bull: with caution, respect, and ideally having someone else standing in front.

My fixer is excellent. Calm, resourceful, and usually able to arrange anything. Which is why I became concerned when he began to look reflective. This happened when I started dealing with the inheritance of my beloved late wife. It was not a complicated case. We had a joint bank account. We owned our apartment fifty-fifty. Our will was beautifully symmetrical: if I died, everything would go to Linda; if she died, everything would go to me. Elegant and logical in its simplicity.

Spain, however, prefers a more baroque approach.

To begin with, I was asked to provide the balance of our bank account on the date of my wife’s passing for inheritance tax purposes. Fair enough. I naively assumed the bank might simply tell me. Instead, they gave me a ten-page document titled, with admirable understatement, “Guide for Processing the Inheritance of the Bank’s Products.” “Products,” in this case, are the money in our account.

Step one: Attend a meeting at the bank to have the process explained. Step two through six: produce a series of documents, each of which appears to require a subset of other documents. Among these is our marriage certificate.

We were married nearly fifty years ago in Ethiopia. This, it turns out, raises concerns. The certificate was deemed “too old,” which struck me as an unusual criticism of a long marriage. I gently suggested that if one marries fifty years ago, the certificate tends to follow suit. This was not received as the breakthrough in administrative philosophy I had hoped for.

What was needed, I was told, was an “international marriage certificate.” Sweden, my home country, does not issue such things. They did, however, offer me a document confirming that I am, indeed, married to Linda, available in Swedish or English. Two languages that, in this context, possess the administrative value of calligraphy.

One helpful official suggested I might return to Addis Ababa to obtain confirmation that my marriage certificate, after half a century, remains valid, and that the Spanish embassy there might assist in translating it into Spanish. At this point, I had learned that irony is not a recognised administrative language, so I simply kept quiet.

And this is just one document.

There are many others, each with its own internal logic, obtainable elsewhere, in person, on alternate Tuesdays, possibly before noon, and accompanied by a photocopy of something not yet requested. The process has a certain philosophical purity: no single requirement is impossible, but the totality comes very close.

I have also discovered that information is generously available. Ask three officials the same question, and you will receive three different answers, all delivered with confidence, and all mutually exclusive. It is less a system than an ongoing conversation without a conclusion.

One begins to understand certain features of Spanish society. For instance, the remarkable density of law firms. In other countries, lawyers are consulted when something has gone wrong. In Spain, they are consulted as a precaution, much like one might carry insurance.

And one cannot help but wonder: who benefits from all this? The civil service is a model of institutional job creation. The legal profession, without question. The fixers, who operate like seasoned guides through a dense jungle. And perhaps the banks. One imagines a mountain of unclaimed inheritances, accruing interest while their rightful owners assemble documentation from multiple continents.

To be fair, obtaining documents from Sweden is relatively straightforward; most things can be downloaded at the click of a mouse. But if you happen to come from a country where records are not digitised, not centralised, or not easily accessible, then this process ceases to be cumbersome and becomes, quite simply, prohibitive.

Which is where the humour fades. Beneath the absurdity lies something less amusing: a system so complex that it risks excluding the very people it is meant to serve.

Still, one must keep perspective. Spain offers sunshine, beauty, warmth, and, in its administrative practices, a powerful incentive to remain alive. That may well be reflected in the country’s very high life expectancy.