Should I have a separate will for each country?

A family with a home in England and an apartment in Portugal, Spain, Italy or France owns, in legal terms, two estates-in-waiting — each of which will one day be settled by a different country’s machinery, in a different language, before different officials. The planning question is whether one document should try to serve both, or whether each country should have its own. For most families the answer is a will in each country — provided the wills are drafted as a pair.

Why two wills beat one

A single home-country will does work abroad — recognition is not the problem. The problem is friction: before a foreign notary can act on an English will, it must be proved at home, translated, legalised and formally explained — often with a certificate of English law — while the family waits. A local will short-circuits all of it: it is already in the local language and form, already sits in the local system, and the local estate can be settled without waiting for the home-country probate at all. The two estates run in parallel instead of in single file — often the difference between months and years. It is also the natural home for the Brussels IV election of your national law, made identically in both wills.

The trap: “I revoke all former wills”

Nearly every professionally drafted will opens with a revocation clause — and that is the accident waiting to happen. The classic sequence: a couple make a Spanish will for the Spanish flat; years later they update their English will after a grandchild arrives; the new English will opens, as they all do, with “I revoke all former wills and testamentary dispositions” — and with those few words, signed in a solicitor’s office in England, the Spanish will is gone. Nobody notices, because nothing looks different. The discovery happens years later, at the worst possible moment, when the notario finds the Spanish will has been revoked by a document nobody in Spain has ever seen — and the Spanish estate falls to be settled the slow way, under a foreign will, or on intestacy.

The three drafting rules that make two wills safe

The cure is neither exotic nor expensive — it is three sentences in the right places. Each will states its territory: the English will governs everything except the Spanish assets; the Spanish will governs only Spain. Each will expressly preserves the other: the revocation clause is limited — “I revoke all former wills in so far as they relate to my assets in [country]” — so neither can silently kill its partner. Both wills make the same choice of law, so the two documents give one consistent answer to the question of which law decides who inherits. And one habit completes the arrangement: whenever either will is updated, both are reviewed — as a pair, by people who can read both.

Where the wills should live

Each will belongs in its own country’s system: the local wills are made before a notary and recorded so that the day it is needed, it will be found — that is much of their value. Keep a copy of each with the other, so no adviser ever acts on one in ignorance of its twin.

What we do

We prepare the local will for any of our four countries (France from January 2027) — drafted to sit correctly alongside your home-country will, with the territory, preservation and choice-of-law clauses aligned — and, where your solicitor is updating the home will, we liaise so the pair stays a pair. Start from the country page: Portugal, Spain, Italy or France — or, if you are unsure whether your existing wills work together, send us both and we will tell you plainly whether the revocation trap is sitting in them.