First, terminology: to avoid confusion and make thing short, I'll be referring to the relevant verb tenses as the preterit and the compound perfect, since I gather those will be recognizable to most students of Spanish. The preterit of comer is comí, comiste, comió..., while the compound perfect is he comido, has comido, ha comido.... The compound perfect is constructed with the present of the auxiliary haber plus the invariant participle of the main verb.
It is a more-or-less well-known fact that speakers of Peninsular
Spanish (the Spanish of Spain, mostly) tend to use the compound perfect more, in contexts where most American Spanish speakers would use the preterit. This increased usage of the compound tense is found both in colloquial speech and in journalistic writing. (I wouldn't know if it also appears in formal, e.g. legal, writing.)
Verb tenses are conventional marks. No tense is strictly confined to a couple of specific usages. And so it is also with these two tenses. Because they are both technically perfect preterite tenses, their fields of meaning overlap in places, so speakers might sometimes choose one or the other. It's not that Spain's speakers always employ the compound perfect and American speakers never do: it's more like there is in each region a different ratio of usage. In the Americas the countries where people use the (simple) preterit in most occasions are Paraguay, Argentina and Chile. Only in Bolivia is the compound perfect preferred.
So the simple answer to this question is: yes, most Spanish speakers from Spain differ markedly from most American speakers on the issue of whether to use the compound preterit tense.
Examples abound, but just for one, contrast how the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia dealt with former king Juan Carlos's discharge from hospital, and how the Argentine La Nación covered the same piece of news:
La Vanguardia:
El rey Juan Carlos ha recibido este sábado el alta hospitalaria tras haber permanecido ocho días hospitalizado en el centro Quirón Salud Madrid de Pozuelo de Alarcón. Allí se le practicó hace una semana un triple “bypass” aortocoronario del que todavía se está recuperando, como ha explicado a los medios de comunicación el propio monarca: “Estoy como si me hubiera pasado un camión por encima”. Sin bajarse del coche, Juan Carlos I ha explicado con su característico humor que se encuentra “fenomenal” con “tuberías y cañerías nuevas”.
La Nación:
Sonriente y con alguna que otra humorada, el rey emérito Juan Carlos fue dado de alta y abandonó la clínica luego de la operación de corazón que se le practicó hace una semana. "Estoy como si me hubiera pasado un camión por arriba. Pero ahora vamos a quitar el camión", dijo el exmonarca a través de la ventanilla del auto en el que abandonó la clínica privada en la que fue intervenido. "Con cañerías nuevas y tuberías nuevas. Fenomenal", agregó, con humor.
Elaborating a bit more, it's as if in the Spanish of Spain the compound perfect has become the default tense for the meaning of perfect preterit (an action that took place in the past, which is viewed as a single event and is now finished). In the Americas, mostly, it's the (simple) preterit that's the default, and we should be asking ourselves when, then, is the compound perfect used in the Americas.
The main thing that seems to correlate with an increased use of the compound perfect in the Americas is the presence of the "now" (meaning not only the adverb ahora but all kinds of complements of time that refer to the present). This doesn't mean that including the "now" in the sentences makes the use of the compound perfect compulsory; there are many occasions where the preterit is fine in those cases.
The presence of the expression todavía... no... ("not yet") makes the tendency even stronger. This is also the case with those which refer to a lapse of time continuing up to the "now" with the word hasta ("until").
On the contrary, some key words and expressions tip the balance towards the use of the (simple) preterit. These are expressions that exclude the "now" by interrupting the lapse of time at some point in the past with hace poco or ya. Words or expressions that refer to a specific point in the past also tend to make the speaker choose the preterit.
I've based my answer on the text of the paper, “Simple past and present perfect in Latin America: inclusion or exclusion of now in the enunciation”, that is cited as the source of another answer. I still think the question is a duplicate, but the previous answer might have been too brief, and in any case, it's not a bad idea to develop certain issues further, especially when the question is in English but the answer is a long paper in Spanish.
