Moving to Spain means encountering a steady stream of unfamiliar terms — legal, administrative, financial and bureaucratic — that don’t always translate cleanly into English. This Spanish glossary for expats is designed to cut through the confusion.

Terms are listed alphabetically for easy searching, with each one tagged to one of five categories: visa and residency, legal and administrative, property and real estate, financial, and daily life.

Whether you’re trying to understand what an arras contract means before you make an offer on a house, what the difference is between a gestor and an abogado, or what Cl@ve is and why you’ll need it, this is the reference we wished we’d had when we started.

We’ll keep adding to it as we encounter new terms on our own journey.