I bought a little villa here near the beach last year. I certainly can't speak to what it was like in the 1980's or 1990's, but the process now is quite easy. Granted, you get a lawyer to look into everything, but you do that in the USA too, and for exactly the same reasons. I had no trouble at all.
I have also purchased more than a dozen used cars in the last 12 months. From Santiago to Sevilla and from Caceres to Cordoba. I have bought Series Land Rovers from old men in small towns and Lancia Fulvias from young professionals at exotic dealerships in big cities. I have never had even the slightest hint of unprofessionalism. Quite the contrary. I have found the Spanish willing to bend over backwards to help me out, even though my Spanish is iffy and I am often handling the transaction alone, very far from home. I have consistently been treated FAR better than I would have been, under similar circumstances, in the States.
"Dishonest, thieving buggers?" Not in my experience.
Since I'm from the USA, I am highly sensitive to the image of the "ugly American" tourist abroad. Loud. Drunk. Covered in cheap tattoos and speaking only English (increasingly loudly and slowly, if the listener doesn't share the language.) Ceaselessly bitching about how things "are better at home" and making little or no effort to appreciate another culture or, dare I even suggest, assimilate. There are very few Americans here in Javea, but plenty of English speaking tourists, and they look very familiar to me.
So I suppose where you choose to live is just different strokes for different folks, and probably for the best because of it. There are unscrupulous, unappealing people everywhere, but by and large they're the minority, and I would never hold an entire nation accountable for the behavior of those few.
