Inheriting Property in Argentina When the Deceased Lived Abroad

Yes, the estate can be opened in Argentina. If the deceased was domiciled abroad but left real estate in the country, Argentine courts have jurisdiction over that property, regardless of where the deceased was living at the time of death and regardless of where the heirs live today. This comes from article 2643 of the Argentine Civil and Commercial Code, and it is one of the few private international law rules in Argentine law that is written without ambiguity.

Two courts can have jurisdiction, not one

Article 2643 provides that the courts of the deceased’s last domicile or those of the place where immovable property is located in the country have jurisdiction over the estate, in respect of that property. That or is not decorative. The rule creates concurrent jurisdiction, so there is no single possible court.

The first door is the classic one, the personal forum, and it is the rule that governs when the entire estate is domestic. In that situation the discussion shifts to which Argentine court has territorial jurisdiction over the estate (in Spanish). The second door is what Argentine lawyers call the forum of the patrimony, and it is the one that matters to a foreign heir. The reasoning behind it is practical: real estate located in Argentine territory forms part of the territory of the State, title to it is transferred under Argentine law, and its registration depends on Argentine public registries. It would create an unworkable situation if the fate of that property depended exclusively on a foreign court.

There is an important limitation in the closing words of the rule. The jurisdiction of the court where the property is located exists in respect of that property, which means it is confined to those assets. It does not turn the Argentine judge into the judge of the deceased’s worldwide estate.

This is settled law, not a recent turn

One clarification worth making, because it often comes up: article 2643 did not introduce anything new. It put in writing what Argentine courts had already been doing for decades.

Under the previous Civil Code there was no rule this clear, but the case law had built the solution out of articles 10 and 11 and the well known note to article 3283. As early as 1990, a decision of the Civil Court of Appeals held that where a deceased person domiciled in a foreign country had left real estate in Argentina, the lex rei sitae applied and jurisdiction belonged to the court of the place where the property was located. Two decades later, a 2010 ruling stated it plainly: Argentine national courts have concurrent international jurisdiction over an estate where the deceased was last domiciled abroad.

The bridge between both regimes can be seen clearly in a December 2014 decision of the Second Court of Appeals of the Province of Buenos Aires. The lower court had declined jurisdiction because the deceased was domiciled in Brazil at the time of death. The Court of Appeals reversed and ordered the estate opened, applying the theory of the international forum of the patrimony, which the ruling describes as received both by the case law and by the then newly enacted Civil and Commercial Code in its articles 2643 and 2644.

The wording that matters: immovable property, not “assets”

This is the fine print, and it is where many enquiries fall apart. Both article 2643 (jurisdiction) and article 2644 (applicable law) refer to immovable property. Not to assets in general.

The distinction is not a drafting quirk. In 2021, deciding an estate where the deceased was domiciled in Argentina while funds in a foreign bank account and shares in a foreign company were located abroad, the Civil Court of Appeals expressly noted that both rules refer only to immovable property, so the same solution cannot simply be extended to other kinds of assets. In that case the observation served to concentrate everything before the Argentine judge of the domicile, who had jurisdiction in any event.

Applied to the reverse situation, the text of the statute leaves an area that needs analysis. If the deceased was last domiciled abroad and the only thing left in Argentina is a savings account, a term deposit or a block of shares, the wording of article 2643 does not provide the same automatic anchor it provides for an apartment. That does not mean there is no route, it means the case requires specific analysis rather than a quotation from memory. Where there is real estate, the discussion barely exists.

Argentine law governs the Argentine property, including forced heirship

Identifying the court is only half the problem. The other half is knowing which law it will apply, and that is the subject of article 2644: the estate is governed by the law of the deceased’s domicile at the time of death, but Argentine law applies to immovable property located in the country.

The Code therefore adopts what scholars call attenuated unity. The general rule is unity (one single law, that of the domicile) with an exception that carries enormous weight in practice: Argentine real estate is governed by Argentine law, full stop.

For readers coming from a common law background, this is usually the most surprising part of the whole subject. Argentina has forced heirship. A fixed portion of the estate is reserved by law for close family members (descendants, ascendants and the surviving spouse) and cannot be freely disposed of (in Spanish). In England, in most of the United States and in other common law jurisdictions, a person can generally execute a will leaving their children nothing. That will may be entirely valid where it was made and still fail to produce that effect over the property situated in Argentina, because the reserved portion over that asset is governed by Argentine law.

This single point is the reason estate planning that ignores an Argentine property tends to unravel. The property does not follow the will, it follows the country where it sits.

Do you have to travel to Argentina?

In the vast majority of cases, no. Heirs living abroad normally act through a power of attorney granted in their country of residence, and the proceeding is conducted in Argentina by local counsel. This is the question foreign heirs ask first, and the honest answer is that the travel is usually avoidable while the paperwork is not.

The formal requirements of that power of attorney depend on where and before whom it is granted, and the differences between jurisdictions are real. It is worth settling the instrument with Argentine counsel before signing anything abroad. A defective power granted overseas is discovered late, and correcting it costs far more than getting it right the first time.

Two further steps apply to every foreign document that has to enter an Argentine court file, and they are usually the real bottleneck. The first is the apostille. Argentina is a party to the Hague Convention abolishing the requirement of legalisation for foreign public documents, approved by Law 23,458, so the death certificate and other foreign public instruments are apostilled in the country where they were issued. The second is translation: documents in a foreign language must be translated into Spanish by a certified public translator registered in Argentina, under Law 20,305.

That part you can start on your own, and it helps enormously: request the death certificate in the country where the death occurred, arrange the apostille, gather the deed to the property, the registry folio and the cadastral details, and collect the civil status certificates that evidence your relationship to the deceased. The more complete that file is when it arrives, the shorter everything that follows.

A practical example

Consider a person last domiciled in Italy who dies there, leaving an apartment in central Córdoba, a bank account in Milan, and two children, one living in Madrid and the other in Rosario.

The Córdoba apartment triggers the forum of the patrimony. The estate in respect of that asset is opened before the courts of Córdoba and resolved under Argentine law, forced heirship included. The Milan bank account, by contrast, is governed by the law of the deceased’s domicile and is handled before the Italian authorities.

The result is two proceedings, in two countries, over a single estate. This is not an anomaly or anyone’s mistake. It is precisely what the system contemplates, and understanding it from the outset prevents mistaken expectations about timelines and costs. And one thing worth knowing early: until the Argentine estate proceeding is completed, the property cannot be sold or transferred, because it remains registered in the name of a deceased person.

Frequently asked questions