Spain is a sovereign country in Western Europe located on the Mediterranean Sea. Besides having a pristine location, the country has the 14th largest economy in the world. It seems recently that Spain can’t seem to stay out of the news. During the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, the Basque flag was flown for the first time over city hall in support of Basque independence. Flying the flag violates the law of Navarre, where Pamplona is located. The other newsworthy item is Spain’s new public safety law that took effect on July 1st. This repressive law, referred to as Ley Mordaza (gag law) is the latest law there to take away civil liberties. With the new laws and extensive Spanish monitoring, you will want to protect your privacy with a VPN.
| Rank | VPN Service | Our Score | Server Locations | Visit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  | 9.8 | 160 |  |
| 2 |  | 9.4 | 87 | |
| 3 |  | 9.2 | 95 | |
| 4 |  | 9.0 | 110 | |
| 5 |  | 8.8 | 73 | |
Effectively, Spain’s public safety law turns the country into a police state with hefty fines for participating in protests, recording police wrongdoing, or in insulting the police. There are also crazy fines for disrupting public events, protesting in front of government buildings, trying to stop an eviction, public drunkenness, and public weed smoking. Get caught doing any of those things and the fines can range from €600 for drinking in public, to €600,000 for protesting in front of a government building.
Because Spain is in Europe, they are subject to protection laws. The Spanish government may only monitor you if is in the interest of national security. It is also very protective of commercial institutions retaining your data. All of that said, a VPN would protect your privacy from prying eyes. I would rather err on the side of caution than trusting a government that would pass a law like the one mentioned earlier.
Another government law increases fines and jail time for people that either directly or indirectly profit from pirated media. A violator of this law could spend up to six years in jail per occurrence and pay fines to compensate the media company that was wronged. Also, Spain has the right to block websites that are deemed as sharing pirated media within 10 days of a court ruling. Despite the harshness of that law, something interesting happened in 2011.
It was determined that peer-to-peer networks were legal. Record companies tried to sue the gentleman that developed what has been called the Spanish version of Napster. It was ruled that the software used to share media was considered to be neutral. Whereas some may use the software to infringe on copyrights, the creator was not responsible for the infringement. Since the music companies seeking damages for unfair competition were not in the file-sharing business, it was also ruled that their argument was invalid.
Let’s look at another use for a VPN service. With the Netflix plan to enter the Spanish market later this year, the popular premium streaming service will finally be available in Spain. Though there is a target date in mind, Netflix has not released the number of titles that will be available. With a VPN, you could gain access to Netflix sooner than October, or you could connect to the market with the largest number of titles, the US. If you are curious about how all of this works, let me explain more.
A VPN or virtual private network is easily used by picking a server in the country you want to connect to, and connecting to it. Not only does this secure connection encrypt your data, it can appear as if you are in another country as well. That is a definite advantage if you want to unblock geo-restrictions. Geo-blocking is used as a way to identify where the user is located and block them if they are outside of the targeted area. You will find that most streaming services do this, as well as Spanish channels you want to view online.
As you can see, there are some great reasons for using a VPN. With the wide variety of VPN types to choose, where would you begin? Well, we have some specific choices in mind for Spain. They all have custom clients, even on mobile, so you would just choose a country to connect to, push the button, and you would be shielded just like that. These suggestions all use secure encryption, however, using the OpenVPN protocol will be your best choice whenever possible. If you are planning on using one of the many streaming services, OpenVPN (UDP) would be your best choice. To connect to a mobile network, you could also look into other protocols including IKEv2 and L2TP for privacy protection.
First, let’s take a look at the objectives behind using a VPN. If you want to protect your data or unblock websites and content, we would advise going with IPVanish. They don’t keep logs and have a kill switch feature, so it will assure your web activity is intact. If you want to try streaming services online like Netflix or others, IPVanish again is the best choice. They have the fastest network in North America and Europe, so you don’t have to wait, and you would be able to stream from the markets with the biggest collections.
If you just want to unblock geo-restricted content, we recommend IPVanish or ExpressVPN. Both encrypt traffic, but ExpressVPN includes SmartDNS with their VPN which will help you unblock channels without the overhead of encryption. However, I would not take for granted that my information was safe within the confines of Spain. I would suggest using encrypted services because, as I mentioned earlier, it is better to err on the side of caution.
Look over our top 10 VPN services for different alternatives, but we feel you will be the most satisfied with the selections we have mentioned. We hand-picked these selections over other leading providers based on security, regional locations, speed, and price. We also looked for services with a good network of VPN servers you might want to connect to.
Reliable VPN services will keep your data intact, and will also have fast networks to stream HD content in other countries. Given those points, these are the best VPNs overall no matter what your objectives are. Spain may have become a hostile nation to civil rights, but you can still protect your online privacy and access geo-blocked sites from Spain with a VPN.