8 - How do I load a Term entity from an EntityReferenceItem?
$node-&gt;country-&gt;entity.


See http://wizzlern.nl/drupal/drupal-8-entity-cheat-sheet, where it lists the properties of common field types.

If you want to see the properties of a field type, one way to do that is by looking at the propertyDefinitions() method of the field type class, in this case EntityReferenceItem.