Rental management

Spanish law does not recognise a single thing called renting out your home. The Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos governs residential tenancies, and its article 5 expressly pushes the furnished, immediately habitable dwelling marketed through tourist channels out of its own scope and into sectoral tourism rules. In Andalusia those rules are Decreto 28/2016. So the first question is not which platform to advertise on, but which statute you intend to operate under — because the two impose different paperwork, different obligations towards the person occupying the house, and different limits on what may be agreed by contract. Both texts are in force in their consolidated versions as at 27 August 2026.

The tourist route is an administrative one. Decreto 28/2016 requires a licencia de ocupación and the technical housing standards that go with it, a declaración responsable filed with the Andalusian tourism authority before the home is offered, and entry in the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía, which follows from that declaration rather than from a discretionary permit. From then on the código de inscripción must appear in every advertisement, in any medium. It is a declaration, not an application, and that is where owners come unstuck: nobody vets the house first, and an inaccurate declaration surfaces later, when it is expensive. Decree text read on 27 August 2026.

Above the decree sits the building. Where a home forms part of a property under horizontal division, article 17.12 of the Ley 49/1960 de Propiedad Horizontal requires an express agreement of three-fifths of the owners, representing three-fifths of the participation quotas, to approve, condition or prohibit tourist letting; the wording that makes express approval the starting point has applied since Ley Orgánica 1/2025 took effect on 3 April 2025. That vote is not a formality for after completion. Read the statutes and the minutes of recent meetings before you commit — a community that has already voted has settled the question for you. Consolidated text read on 27 August 2026.

The residential route trades upside for stability, and it is more rigid than it looks. Title II of the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos is imperative in the tenant’s favour: article 6 makes void any clause that worsens the tenant’s position under it. The tenant can insist on annual extensions up to a statutory minimum term, longer where the landlord is a legal person than where the landlord is an individual, and a tacit extension follows unless one side gives notice in time. None of that is fixable by better drafting. The real question is therefore not what the contract says, but which term you can genuinely carry.

Once let, a tourist home carries daily duties that a tenancy does not. Anyone carrying on a lodging activity must keep a documentary register of the people who stay, transmit the prescribed data to the authorities within twenty-four hours, and retain it for three years, under Real Decreto 933/2021. The Andalusian decree adds its own guest-facing obligations: identification on arrival, a written document of the stay, complaint forms available in the home, and an emergency telephone number that someone actually answers. All of it is trivial when you live nearby and structural when you do not. Both texts read on 27 August 2026.

The two regimes are not sealed off from each other. Decreto 28/2016 excludes from its own scope a dwelling contracted for more than two continuous months by the same user, so a long winter let is not a tourist let and is not governed as one. An owner who lets short in summer and long in winter is operating under two sets of rules in a single year. That is legitimate, and it needs planning: the contract, the register duty, the insurance and the community’s position all change with the regime, not with the season. Decree read on 27 August 2026.

Everything above this line reads the same at every address on the coast. The Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos and the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal are state law; Decreto 28/2016 and the tourism registry are Andalusian; the guest-register duty is state law again. Move a home twenty kilometres along the coast and none of it changes. That is why this page can be written once, and why it is worth reading before you look at any particular house: it is the frame every property on this coast stands inside.

What it does not settle is whether one specific address may be let at all. Planning is municipal. A town hall decides which uses its plan permits and where, how it treats a dwelling above a commercial ground floor, whether it has capped or zoned tourist use, and how quickly it replies. Those positions differ from one municipality to the next and several are under revision, so a rule someone quotes from the next town along is not evidence about yours. The only safe version is the town hall’s own written answer, for your street, on the day you commit.

Between the two sits the building, which answers to neither: a community can settle the question by vote regardless of what the plan or the decree permits. So the reading order is this page first, then the area page for the municipality you are actually buying in — each carries the local licence position, the season and the demand pattern as they stand there — and only then the two documents that decide your own case: the community’s minutes and the town hall’s written reply.