VPN/database in Spain is slower than the government

Hey friends, my background is BSEE and i work with an american company, i also have a fundamental understanding of how networking systems behave. We have a primary office in Spain that we must obtain historical documents (PDFs) from in order to do a lot of our work. The documents originated in Spain many years ago. We use a laptop here in the US which the IT team in Spain must set up as if someone working in Spain is using it, so it’s on Spain time, and uses their OS enterprise licenses, etc with their VPN.

When we connect to their database it’s absurd how long everything takes to do anything. Is this a normal behavior for overseas VPN? Is spain a particularly poorly connected country? What could we do to improve the system? Sometimes searching their database can take 4 hours to find parts or download small to medium size PDFs, with the added problem of an automatic 4 hour timeout, making some tasks to find documents nearly 2 days worth of work. We have fiber to the building and 50u/50d connections per computer here in the US at my office.