The Specific Bequest (Legado) in Spain in 2026: How CC Articles 858-891 Assign Individual Assets in a Will

A legado is a particular testamentary disposition under Articles 858 to 891 of the Codigo Civil by which a testator assigns a specific, identified asset to a named legatario. Unlike the heredero, who succeeds the deceased universally and inherits both assets and debts, the legatario is a successor at title particular: they receive the bequeathed thing without taking on the estate’s liabilities. For a property owner writing a Spanish will, the legado is the mechanism for leaving a specific villa, apartment, share portfolio or cash sum to a chosen person while the residue passes to the herederos.

What is a legado under Spanish succession law?

A legado is a particular succession device, regulated in Section Ten (Articles 858 to 891) of the Codigo Civil, that allows a testator to assign a concrete, individually identified asset to a specific person (the legatario) without making that person an heir. The heredero succeeds universally, acquiring the whole estate subject to its debts; the legatario succeeds particularly, acquiring only the named thing. This universal versus particular distinction is the structural backbone of Spanish succession law and determines who pays the estate’s debts, how the asset is delivered, and how the inheritance tax base is computed.

The legado exists only in testate succession. There is no intestate legado: a person who dies without a valid will cannot leave a legado because the disposition requires the testator’s express testamentary will. The Codigo Civil treats legados as a complete subsystem within testamentary dispositions, with rules on validity, extinction, delivery, priority of payment and the legatario’s acceptance rights.

What types of legado does the Codigo Civil recognise?

Articles 858 to 891 cover legados across their full lifecycle. The provisions distinguish several functional types, each with different rules on validity and delivery.

Legado type	Article	What the testator leaves	Key rule
Legado de cosa especifica y determinada	882	A particular, identified thing (a villa, a painting)	Legatario acquires ownership at the testator’s death; the thing passes at the legatario’s risk (Art 882)
Legado de genero	875	A thing identified by category, not individually	Valid for movable goods even if none exist in the estate; for immovable property, valid only if the estate contains something of that type (Art 875)
Legado de cantidad	886	A sum of money	Heredero must pay in cash, even if no cash is in the estate (Art 886)
Legado de cosa ajena	861-862	A thing belonging to a third party	Valid if the testator knew it was a third party’s; the heredero must acquire it or pay its value. Null if the testator was unaware (Art 862)
Legado de credit or debt pardon	870	A credit against a third party, or forgiveness of the legatario’s debt	Effective only for the portion subsisting at the testator’s death; the heredero cedes the actions against the debtor (Art 870)
Legado de educacion o alimentos	879	Education or maintenance support	Education lasts until the legatario reaches majority; alimentos lasts for the legatario’s lifetime unless the testator says otherwise (Art 879)
Legado de pension periodica	880	A periodic pension (annual, monthly, weekly)	Legatario can claim the first period at the testator’s death and subsequent periods at the start of each cycle (Art 880)

The most common legado in property planning is the legado de cosa especifica: the testator leaves a particular apartment or villa to a named legatario. Article 882 provides that ownership of the specific thing passes to the legatario at the instant of the testator’s death, and the legatario makes their own any fruits or pending rents from that moment. The thing also passes at the legatario’s risk, meaning the legatario bears any loss or deterioration after the testator’s death and benefits from any improvement.

How does a legado differ from an inheritance?

The distinction between heredero and legatario is the single most important concept for a property owner structuring a Spanish will.

Dimension	Heredero	Legatario
Succession type	Universal (title universal)	Particular (title particular)
What they receive	The entire estate, or a proportional share	A specific, identified asset
Responsibility for debts	Unlimited, even with personal assets, unless acceptance benefits of inventory	None, except charges imposed by the testator (Art 858) or if the whole estate is distributed in legados (Art 891)
How they acquire	Must accept or repudiate the inheritance	Acquires at the testator’s death for pure and simple legados (Art 881), but must request delivery (Art 885)
Can renounce part?	No, the heredero accepts or repudiates the whole	No, if the legado is onerous they cannot accept part and reject part (Art 889)
Tax base (ISD Art 9)	Net value of their share of the estate	Net value of the individual asset received
Who delivers?	Takes possession through the partition	The heredero or albacea delivers (Art 885)

A person can be both heredero and legatario simultaneously. Article 890 allows a heredero who is also a legatario to renounce the inheritance and keep the legado, or vice versa. This flexibility lets a testator leave a specific property to one person as legatario while appointing the same or another person as heredero for the residue.

When does a legado become extinguished?

Article 869 sets out three causes of extinction, each reflecting the principle that a legado of a specific thing depends on that thing surviving in the testator’s estate at death.

First, if the testator transforms the thing so that it loses neither its form nor its denomination, the legado fails. Second, if the testator alienates the thing by any title or cause, the legado is extinguished for the part alienated. If the thing later returns to the testator’s dominion, even through nullity of the contract, the legado does not revive, unless the reacquisition was through a retroventa pact. Third, if the thing perishes entirely during the testator’s life or after death without the heredero’s fault, the legado fails, though the obligor remains liable for eviction if the thing was not determined in species (Article 860).

Article 866 adds another extinction ground: a legado of a thing that already belonged to the legatario at the time the will was made produces no effect, even if the legatario later alienated it. Article 878 partially qualifies this: if the legatario acquired the thing by a lucrative title after the will date, they can claim nothing, but if they acquired it by an onerous title, they can ask the heredero to indemnify what they paid.

How does the legatario take delivery?

Article 885 provides the fundamental rule: the legatario cannot occupy the bequeathed thing by their own authority. They must request delivery and possession from the heredero or, where the testator authorised the albacea to deliver, from the albacea. This procedural step distinguishes the legado from the herencia, where the heredero acquires possession through the partition.

Article 886 imposes the corresponding obligation on the heredero: they must deliver the actual thing legado if it still exists, not its monetary valuation. For money legados, the heredero must pay in cash even if the estate contains no cash. The necessary costs of delivery fall on the estate, subject to the legitima of forced heirs. Article 883 adds that the thing must be delivered with all its accessories and in the state it was in at the testator’s death.

What happens when the estate cannot cover all legados?

Article 887 establishes a priority order for paying legados when the estate’s assets are insufficient:

1. Remuneratory legados (those compensating services rendered to the testator)
2. Legados of a certain and determined thing forming part of the estate
3. Legados the testator declared preferred
4. Legados of alimentos
5. Legados of education
6. All others, pro rata

This hierarchy protects the most socially valuable legados first. For a property owner, it means a legado of a specific villa ranks second in priority, behind only remuneratory legados, but ahead of cash or generic legados. Where the testator distributes the entire estate in legados with no heredero, Article 891 prorates the estate’s debts and charges among the legatarios in proportion to their shares, unless the testator provided otherwise. This is the one scenario in which a legatario bears estate liabilities.

How is a legado taxed under the Spanish inheritance tax?

Under Article 5 of Ley 29/1987 (Impuesto sobre Sucesiones y Donaciones), the legatario is a contribuyente in a mortis causa acquisition, alongside the heredero. Under Article 9, the base imponible is the net value of the individual acquisition: for a legatario, this is the value of the specific asset received, minorable by any deductible charges. The legatario does not aggregate the whole estate’s value into their base, only the legado’s value.

In Andalusia, the 99 per cent bonification on the cuota applies to Group I and II kinship (descendants, ascendants and spouse) under Article 38 of Ley 5/2021, reducing the effective inheritance tax to a token amount for close family legatarios. A legatario who is a non-resident child or spouse of the deceased benefits from the same bonification as a resident, provided the assets are located in Andalusia (Article 38 applies the regional bonification regardless of the legatario’s residence, subject to the connection point rules in Article 36 of Ley 29/1987). The inheritance tax filing guide covers the Modelo 650 declaration the legatario must file, and the Andalusia inheritance tax guide explains the bonification in detail.

The distinction between heredero and legatario matters at the filing stage. Both file the same Modelo 650, but the legatario declares only the legado’s value, while the heredero declares their proportional share of the net estate. A legatario of a specific apartment, for instance, pays ISD on that apartment’s value, not on a share of the entire estate. Where the testator has appointed an albacea to deliver legacies, the legatario’s claim for delivery runs against the albacea, who has default powers to satisfy cash legacies under Article 902.

How does the legado interact with the legitima?

A legado cannot prejudice the legitima of forced heirs. Article 863 makes the legado of a thing belonging to the heredero or another legatario subject to the legitima of forced heirs, and Article 891’s prorating rule preserves the estate’s debt obligations. Where the total legados exceed the freely disposable portion of the estate (the portion remaining after the legitima), the legados are reduced pro rata, starting with those the testator declared least preferred, until the legitima is protected. The forced heirs framework explains how the legitima is calculated and what the testator can freely dispose of.

For a non-resident property owner, the legado is a practical tool: it lets the testator leave a specific Spanish property to a chosen person while routing the rest of the estate through the non-resident inheritance process. The legatario’s claim is simpler than a heredero’s: they receive one asset, not a share of an estate with its debts, and their ISD filing covers only that asset’s value. The testator can also appoint a contador-partidor to handle the partition for the herederos while the legado is delivered separately.

Can a legatario accept part of a legado and reject the rest?

Article 889 prohibits splitting: a legatario cannot accept one part of a legado and repudiate another if the repudiated part is onerous. Where a legatario has two legados, one onerous and one gratuitous, Article 890 prevents them from renouncing the onerous one and keeping the gratuitous one. If both are onerous or both gratuitous, the legatario is free to accept or repudiate each. Where a legatario dies before accepting the legado leaving several herederos, one of those herederos may accept and another repudiate the portion corresponding to them in the legado.

Worked example: a will with herederos and a legatario

Consider a testator who owns a Marbella apartment (EUR 500,000), a bank account (EUR 100,000) and debts of EUR 50,000. The will names two children as herederos in equal shares and leaves the apartment as a legado de cosa especifica to a sibling.

The sibling (legatario) acquires ownership of the apartment at the testator’s death under Article 882. The sibling does not inherit the EUR 50,000 debt, which falls to the two herederos. The sibling requests delivery from the herederos under Article 885, and the herederos must deliver the apartment itself under Article 886. The sibling’s ISD base is EUR 500,000 (the apartment’s value), not a share of the net estate. If the sibling is a Group III relative of the testator, the Andalusia 99 per cent bonification does not apply (it covers only Groups I and II), so the sibling pays the full ISD tariff on the apartment’s value, applying the Group III multiplier. The herederos, as children, benefit from the 99 per cent bonification on their shares of the EUR 100,000 bank account minus EUR 50,000 debts.

This example shows the legado’s tax planning value: the testator can route a specific asset to a person who is not a forced heir, with a separate and simpler tax computation, while the herederos inherit the residue with the estate’s debts and the close family bonification.