Spain also smashes foreigners owning a property in Spain.
They see tourists and foreigners (even if they're from the EU) as a gigantic target to squeeze and screw as hard as they can. That's what you get when your economy is based on tourism and rich foreigners owning property there: you have to squeeze those hard for it's basically all you have. Officially tourism is "only" about 15% of the GDP but Spain is a service economy and so many of those services revolve around tourism and foreigner owning properties there. Same for the construction sector: they love it when rich tourists have fancy villas built there.
My wife used to own a house there. So did her mom. They sold it all and kissed Spain goodbye once and for all: too disgusted by how the fiscal authorities were treating them.
I won't go on vacation there anymore. Both my wife and my daughter speak spanish and yet we don't plan to go there anymore: she's done giving money to Spain to be seen, in return, as a lemon out of which more juice can be squeezed.
Vote with your feet and you wallet: when a country tries to fuck you, give it the middle finger.
> “Spain also smashes foreigners owning a property in Spain.”
In which way?
Usually when people say stuff like this it translates to “the tax rate is slightly higher than [insert less desirable location here]” or "my marginal tax rate seems really high since I have a very high income"
Spain charges you tax if you rent the property out. If you don't rent the property out, it imputes a rent and you are charged tax on the imputed rent.
The cadastral value is (finger in the air) 40% of the value of the property; you pay (non-eu resident) 24% of between 1.1% and 2% of the cadastral value.
So 0.1%-0.2% of property value annually.