banking for uk residents with property in Spain

I had the same,  very poor experience with Santander, impossible, sometimes rude.. online banking did not work cause I did not want to have Spanish mobile etc, etc..I changed to 

Sabadell and are very satisfied. I am norwegian but no problem, smooth online banking, bills payed on time, fluent in English, just very satisfied. We have a house in San Pedro with a local branch nearby home. Everything is perfect if you prefer to pay online og have them doing regular bills monthly, yearly etc. 

There is the very popular option of having a free Wise account. You can do away with the Spanish bank completely. All bills can be paid by direct debit. Many posters on here have swapped to Wise.

Look here:

www.wise.com 

Steve 

Hi

I am using Cajamar rural it like a building society 

I put €1000 in the society shares which you can get back if you leave I pay about €40 in charges a year at the most.

I like you own but don’t live in Spain hope it is an option for you 

Just set up an account with Wise. It is the most convenient, responsive, helpful, easiest and best of all no monthly charges. You can also convert your pound sterling to euro at best exchange rates when needed. It is no brainer!!! 

I bought my house in 2015. My solicitor set up a Santander personal account replete with IBAN in order to transfer funds at completion. I live on the Isle of Man - a Crown Protectorate

When I called in to meet the manager he told me that he could not guarantee that my cash would not be frozen (!!) 

I went to Sabadell and have been paying their ridiculous fees ever since (apparently no fees for new account holders now) but will be switching to Wise once I get assurances from my sundry payees that their systems will process EU IBAN (not Spanish) direct debits

I use Wise for all monthly expenses and I am happy with them. There was a problem about the speed/cost of transfer Sterling/USD from my Currency Direct/Nationwide accounts; Wise claims to have fixed this now in a recent report (sorry, can't locate it).

Interested to know if you received assurances from '...sundry payees that their systems will process EU IBAN (not Spanish) direct debits..'. That's the only reason I have an expensive inflexible Sabadell account to pay for elec, water etc. I recently switched my UK driving licence for a Spanish one. DGT did not care about the origin of the payment! 

Be wise and use Wise. They give you a Mastercard and it's accepted everywhere. All you need do is transfer money from your Bank to Wise, it takes about one hour. Go to a cash machine and draw out what you need. All supermarkets  happily accept Wise. Also, you can set up direct debits etc. So what is the really good thing about Wise? You only transfer a safe amount to it. So if the card  is stolen the thief only takes what you transferred  and not the whole amount that you have  in your High St Bank. 

As most recommend here Wise the answer also for UK money transfers. Spanish banks best avoided where possible.  

I agree Wise or similar is the best solution but government departments won’t accept payments from foreign IBANs eg. Police National for IDs etc. As tworowans notes above. The alternative was  had to use was paying cash into a ‘proper’ ie. Spanish bank and take the receipt to the department. I noted above that DGT is an honourable exception