Buying a home

Nothing in a Spanish purchase moves before you have a fiscal identity. For an individual without Spanish nationality the tax number is the NIE, and article 206 of Real Decreto 557/2011 describes it exactly: a personal, unique, sequential number assigned by the Dirección General de la Policía y de la Guardia Civil. A buyer whose connection to Spain is economic is not given one automatically — they have to ask for it, in person or through a Spanish consulate abroad, stating the reason. The regulation allows the competent office a maximum of five days to resolve the application, counted from the day it reaches that office’s register rather than from the day you decide you need one.

A reservation and an arras contract are different instruments, and treating them as one is the commonest way a foreign buyer gives up leverage early. A reserva is a private agreement with no article of its own in Spanish law: it does what its own wording says it does, so the only question worth pressing is what happens to the money if the file turns out badly. The arras contract sits on firmer ground. Article 1454 of the Código Civil gives both sides a priced exit — the buyer walks away by forfeiting the deposit, the seller by returning it twice over — but only where the document is genuinely drafted as arras penitenciales. Read which one is in front of you.

Two institutions examine the same purchase and neither stands in for the other. The notary authorises the escritura pública, and under article 1462 of the Código Civil the granting of that deed is itself the delivery of the thing sold — ownership moves at the table, not in an office some weeks later. The Registro de la Propiedad then inscribes the deed, and it is that inscription which article 34 of the Ley Hipotecaria protects: a buyer who acquires for value, in good faith, from the person the register shows as entitled to transfer is kept in the acquisition. One act transfers; the other defends what was transferred. Stopping after the first leaves a wall out.

The nota simple is the document every buyer asks for and few read to the end. Article 222 of the Ley Hipotecaria defines it narrowly: a succinct extract of the entries on one finca, giving the property, the identity of whoever holds the registered rights over it, the extent, nature and limits of those rights, and any prohibition or restriction affecting them. Its value is purely informative — the certificación is the certified form — and it speaks only for the moment it was issued, so the useful ones are the second and the third, taken close to signature. Article 254 of the same law then blocks registration outright where a fiscal number is missing, or where the deed records a refusal to identify the means of payment.

A house carries two descriptions and they are permitted to disagree. The Catastro records what is there for administrative and tax purposes, the Registro records the legal title, and article 2 of the Ley del Catastro Inmobiliario states plainly that neither displaces the other. Article 13 obliges owners to declare alterations to the cadastral record, and frequently they have not. Article 199 of the Ley Hipotecaria is the route by which the two descriptions are brought into graphic coordination. None of this is paperwork for its own sake: a mortgage valuation is prepared under Orden ECO/805/2003 on what is legally there, so an unlicensed terrace or an undeclared annexe quietly reduces what a lender will advance.

Completion is one sitting with a fixed agenda, and the item most often waved through is the community certificate. Article 9 of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal obliges the seller to declare in the deed that the general charges are paid and to produce a certificate saying so; the public document may not be authorised without it unless the buyer expressly releases him from the duty. Do not release him. The same article makes the home itself answerable for a previous owner’s unpaid charges over the elapsed part of the year of purchase and the three calendar years before it, which turns a waiver signed for speed into a debt bought at full price.

The spine of a Spanish purchase is national and does not move. The Código Civil defines the sale and the effect of the deed. The Ley Hipotecaria defines the register, what it publishes and whom it protects. The notarial function, the fiscal number, the duty to identify the means of payment and the mortgage-transparency regime under Ley 5/2019 apply in the same terms in every municipality on this coast, as at 27 August 2026. That is what makes it possible to write the sequence once, and it is why a buyer who has completed elsewhere in Spain will recognise most of what happens here.

What is not national is everything that touches the building itself. The rate of transfer tax is fixed by the autonomous community. The planning act that decides whether an unlicensed work can be recognised, and on what terms, is regional — in Andalucía, Ley 7/2021, whose article 173 provides for recognising an old work as asimilado a fuera de ordenación without legalising it. And the licence file, the plan that governs the plot and the officials who answer questions about both exist in exactly one town hall and nowhere else. Two coastal municipalities twenty minutes apart can hold the same house to different answers.

So the specifics live one level down. Each area page listed below sets out how a purchase actually runs in that municipality: which department holds the licence archive, what the local plan permits, what the stock is made of and what tends to go wrong. Use this page for the order of events and for the documents that bind. Use the area page for the file. Where the two ever appear to disagree, the area page is the one that has been checked against a named town hall, and it wins.