Communities of owners in Spain: your rights as a foreign owner — the meeting, the majorities, the derramas and the debtor rules

The envelope arrives in Leeds or Hamburg in the second week of September: a convocatoria in Spanish for a meeting in Costa Adeje on a Tuesday at six, an agenda with a €40,000 lift on it, and — because a direct debit bounced in June — your own name on a list of owners in arrears. Most foreign owners meet Spanish community law this way: not when they buy, but the first time the building asks them for something. This piece sets out what the law gives you and asks of you as an owner in a comunidad de propietarios: who decides what and with which majorities, what you pay and why, what happens when you do not, and how you defend yourself from two thousand kilometres away. It reads the Horizontal Property Act — the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal of 1960, in the text in force in September 2026, including the amendment of March 2026 — and says plainly what has not changed, starting with the meeting you still cannot attend by video.

What you own, what you share, and who decides

When you buy a flat in a Spanish block you buy two things at once. The flat itself — the space inside its walls, with its own installations and any annex the deed names, a garage space or a storeroom — is yours alone (LPH, article 3.a). Everything else you own in common with your neighbours, and the Civil Code's list is long: the ground and the roof, the structure, «the façades, with the external claddings of terraces, balconies and windows», the entrance, stairs and lifts, the pipes and cables for water, gas, electricity and drainage «up to the entry into the private space», the aerials and the intercom (Civil Code, article 396). The balconies in the photograph above are, on their outer face, the community's; the room behind each of them is the owner's.

Your share of the common elements is a percentage — the cuota de participación — fixed in the deed that created the community, the título constitutivo, on the basis of the flat's floor area, its position and the use it is expected to make of the common services (LPH, article 5). That percentage is the measure of almost everything that follows: it is your share of the bills, and it is the weight of your vote. The same deed may contain estatutos, private rules on the use of the building, its expenses and its administration, which bind a buyer only if they are registered at the Land Registry (article 5); and the owners may add house rules — normas de régimen interior — on the details of living together, adopted by ordinary majority and binding on every owner and occupant (article 6). Ask for all three documents before you buy, and read the statutes twice: a clause banning short-term lets, or reserving the pool to the owners of one block, lives there.

The community is run by four organs (article 13). The owners' meeting — the junta de propietarios — is sovereign: it appoints and removes the office-holders, approves the budget and the accounts, decides on works ordinary and extraordinary, adopts or amends the statutes and the house rules, and decides everything else of general interest (article 14). The president must be an owner, is elected or, failing that, chosen by rotation or lot, represents the community in and out of court and holds office for one year unless the statutes say otherwise; the appointment is compulsory, and an owner who cannot serve — living abroad is the usual reason — may ask the court to be relieved within a month of taking office (article 13.2, 13.3, 13.7). The secretary and the administrator may be the president, another owner or, as in most resorts on the islands, a professional firm (article 13.5, 13.6); the administrator keeps the accounts, orders urgent repairs, executes the works the meeting has approved and keeps the community's documents at the owners' disposal (article 20). In a complex of several buildings around a shared pool and gardens, there is often a second layer: a grouped community of the blocks, where the presidents of each building sit and vote for their owners (article 24).

The meeting: when it is called, how you are told, how you vote from abroad

The meeting must be held at least once a year to approve the budget and the accounts, and otherwise whenever the president decides or a quarter of the owners — or owners holding 25 % of the quotas — ask for one (article 16.1). Any owner may write to the president asking for a subject to be put on the agenda of the next meeting, and the president must include it (article 16.2). The notice — the convocatoria — comes from the president and must state the agenda, the place, the day and the hour of the first and the second call, and it must list the owners who are not up to date with their payments, with a warning that they will not be able to vote (article 16.2). The annual meeting needs at least six days' notice; an extraordinary one, «whatever notice is possible» (article 16.3). If the first call does not gather a majority of owners holding a majority of quotas, the meeting proceeds on second call — half an hour later on the same day, in practice — with no quorum at all (article 16.2). Almost every meeting in Spain is held on second call, which is why the majorities in the next section have two versions.

How you are told is the rule most owners abroad only discover afterwards. Notices are served at the address in Spain you have given the community's secretary by a means that proves receipt; if you have given none, the flat itself is your address, a notice handed to whoever occupies it is validly served, and a notice that cannot be delivered there goes on the community's notice board and takes full effect three days later (article 9.1.h). A convocation pinned to a board in Tenerife while you are in Manchester is, in law, a convocation you received. Give the secretary an address that answers — your lawyer's office, a trusted neighbour, the administrator under a written mandate — and confirm it in writing. E-mail is not yet in the Act: the bill mentioned below would add it.

You need not be there. Attendance «may be in person or by legal or voluntary representation, a writing signed by the owner being sufficient to prove it» (article 15.1): a one-page proxy naming a neighbour, a friend, your administrator or your lawyer, with instructions on how to vote, is all the law asks. Co-owners of one flat must appoint a single representative; where the flat is held in usufruct, the bare owner attends and votes but is presumed to be represented by the usufructuary unless he says otherwise (article 15.1). One condition applies to everyone: an owner who, when the meeting opens, is not up to date with every debt that has fallen due, and has neither challenged the debt in court nor deposited it with the court or a notary, may speak but may not vote, and his quota is left out of the count for every majority (article 15.2). The bounced direct debit of June costs you the vote of September.

And the video call? It is not in the law. Article 16 has not been amended since 1999, and nothing in the Act provides for a meeting held by videoconference or a vote cast by e-mail. A bill that would add video meetings, a digital minutes book and an e-mail address for notices passed its first vote in the Congress of Deputies in late May 2026 and was in the amendments phase of the Justice Committee when this article was written; it changes nothing until the Official State Gazette prints it. A community that meets online today does so on the goodwill of its owners, and an agreement adopted that way is open to challenge by anyone who was not there. Until the reform is law, the meeting is in person or by proxy — which is why the proxy matters so much for an owner abroad. The community administrators at Fuerteventura Properties publish the proxy form and the how-to for owners who live elsewhere.

Majorities: what can be imposed on you, and what cannot

The Act does not have one majority; it has a ladder, rewritten piece by piece over twenty-five years and last touched on 22 March 2026. Read from the bottom up (article 17, unless another article is cited):

• No vote at all. Works needed to keep the building safe, habitable and accessible, and works imposed by the administration, are mandatory and need no resolution — the meeting only decides how the cost is spread (article 10.1.a). Accessibility works requested by an owner whose household includes a person with a disability or over seventy are mandatory when their annual cost does not exceed twelve months of ordinary fees after subsidies, or when public aid covers 75 % of them (article 10.1.b). A charging point for your own electric car in your own parking space needs only prior notice to the community, at your cost (article 17.5).
• One third of the owners holding one third of the quotas. Common telecommunications infrastructure, and «systems, common or private, for the use of renewable energies, including aerothermal and geothermal» — words that Royal Decree-Law 7/2026 put into the Act with effect from 22 March 2026 — or the infrastructure needed for new collective energy supplies (article 17.1). The cost may not be passed to owners who did not vote in favour; if they later want to connect, they pay their updated share.
• A majority of the owners holding a majority of the quotas. Works and services that remove architectural barriers, and lifts in every case, even where the deed or the statutes must change — and once approved the community pays even beyond the twelve-month cap (article 17.2). Energy-efficiency works and common renewable installations, subsidies included, when the net annual cost stays within twelve months of ordinary fees (article 17.2).
• Three fifths of the owners holding three fifths of the quotas. A porter, a concierge, security or any other common service of general interest; letting out common elements with no assigned use; equipment that improves the building's energy or water efficiency (article 17.3). Improvements that the building does not need — a new pool, a gym — with an important reservation: an owner who voted against is not bound if his share of the cost exceeds three months of ordinary fees, unless he later wants to use the improvement (article 17.4). Dividing or merging flats, adding floors, closing terraces and any other change to the structure or the common things (article 17.4). And since 3 April 2025, the resolution «that approves, limits, conditions or prohibits» holiday lets in the building, with special fees of up to 20 % more for the flats that let, never with retroactive effect (article 17.12); an owner who wants to start letting must first obtain the community's express approval (article 7.3). We covered what that veto means in the Canaries when the rule arrived.
• Unanimity of all the owners holding all the quotas. Anything else that amends the deed or the statutes (article 17.6) — changing the quotas, for instance, which the Act fixes by the agreement of all the owners, an arbitral award or a court decision (articles 3 and 5).
• Everything else: a simple majority, of owners and quotas on first call, and on second call a majority of those present holding more than half of the quotas present (article 17.7). Where no majority can be reached, an owner may ask the court within a month of the second meeting to decide «in equity» (article 17.7).

Two rules close the ladder. Absent owners who were duly notified count as votes in favour unless, within thirty calendar days of being told of the resolution, they notify their dissent to the secretary by a means that proves receipt — except where the cost cannot be passed to those who did not vote for it, or the change is for someone's private use (article 17.8). For an owner abroad this is the deadline that matters: the minutes arrive, and thirty days later your silence has become a yes. And every resolution validly adopted binds every owner, present, absent or dissenting (article 17.9).

Your money: fees, the reserve fund and derramas

You contribute to the general expenses of the building «according to the quota fixed in the deed» (article 9.1.e), and not using a service does not excuse you from paying for it (article 9.2): the owner of a ground-floor flat pays for the lift. The meeting approves the budget and the accounts every year (article 14.b), and the community must keep a reserve fund of at least 10 % of its last ordinary budget for conservation, repair and rehabilitation works (article 9.1.f). When the budget is not enough — a roof, a lift, a façade — the meeting votes a derrama, an extraordinary contribution spread by quota. The administrators at Fuerteventura Properties explain how the fees and the derramas are calculated; two rules from the Act are worth carrying with you.

The first concerns timing. A derrama for improvements is owed by «whoever is the owner at the moment the amounts become due» (article 17.11): a levy voted in March and payable in October falls on the person who owns the flat in October, whatever the deed of sale says between seller and buyer. The second concerns the flat itself. A buyer answers, with the flat, for the fees the previous owners left unpaid in the year of the purchase and the three calendar years before it, and the seller must declare at the notary that he is up to date and hand over a certificate of debts issued by the secretary within seven calendar days, without which the deed cannot be signed unless the buyer expressly waives it (article 9.1.e). Read our guide to buying before you sign, and the debt-certificate piece the same administrators wrote for both sides of the table.

The meeting may also adopt measures against late payment — interest above the legal rate, the temporary suspension of non-essential services — provided they are neither abusive nor retroactive and do not touch the habitability of the flat; in any event a debt to the community earns interest from the day it fell due (article 21.1).

If you fall behind: the debtor rules

The Act treats arrears seriously, and the consequences arrive in a fixed order. You lose your vote at the next meeting (article 15.2). Your name appears in the convocation (article 16.2). You cannot challenge the meeting's resolutions unless you first pay or deposit what you owe — the only exception being a dispute about the quotas themselves (article 18.2). And the community may claim through a fast-track court procedure of its own, the monitorio: with a certificate of the debt signed by the secretary and approved by the president, and proof that the debt was notified to you — on the notice board, if need be, for three days — it asks the court to order payment; if you oppose, the court will freeze assets of yours to cover the claim, interest and costs without the community posting any bond; and whether you pay on demand or not, the community's lawyer and procurador fees are yours to pay, within the limits the procedural law sets (article 21.2 to 21.5). The claim can be brought against the registered owner so that the flat itself answers for it (article 21.2). The community's own debts to third parties — a builder, a bank — can reach you too: each owner who was a party to the proceedings answers, subsidiarily and after a demand for payment, for his quota of what the community cannot pay — unless he proves he was up to date with the community when the demand reached him (article 22).

How far back can the community go? Five years per instalment. The Supreme Court settled the point in judgment 1726/2025 of 26 November 2025: community fees are payments «to be made by years or in shorter periods» and prescribe under article 1966.3.º of the Civil Code, including debts that accrued before the 2015 reform of the general limitation period; a formal out-of-court demand interrupts the five years, and the owner must plead the prescription — the court will not apply it for him. The practical answer for an owner abroad is not the limitation period but a SEPA direct debit from an account that does not bounce, an address in Spain that answers, and someone with a mandate to sort out the odd rejected payment before the meeting.

Defending yourself: challenges, minutes and documents

A resolution of the meeting can be challenged in court on three grounds: it is contrary to the law or the statutes; it seriously harms the community for the benefit of one or a few owners; or it seriously harms an owner who has no legal duty to bear it, or was adopted in abuse of rights (article 18.1). Three groups may sue: owners who voted against and had their dissent recorded, owners who were absent for any reason, and owners unduly deprived of their vote — always on condition of being up to date with the community (article 18.2). The clock is short: three months from the resolution, extended to one year when the resolution is contrary to the law or the statutes, and for absent owners the period runs from the day the resolution was communicated to them (article 18.3). Challenging does not stop the resolution being executed unless the judge orders so as an interim measure (article 18.4). The claim goes through the ordinary civil procedure (Civil Procedure Act, article 249.1.8.º) and, since 3 April 2025, must be preceded by an attempt at an out-of-court settlement — the MASC our litigation piece explains — because the challenge of a community resolution is a declaratory claim like any other (Organic Law 1/2025, article 5).

The minutes are your evidence. Every meeting is recorded in a minutes book stamped by the Land Registry, and each entry must state the date and place, who called the meeting, whether it was ordinary or extraordinary and on which call, every owner present or represented with their quotas, the agenda, and the resolutions with the names and quotas of those who voted for and against where that matters for validity (article 19.1, 19.2). The minutes are closed with the president's and the secretary's signatures within ten calendar days, the resolutions are enforceable from then, and a copy is sent to every owner at the address of article 9 (article 19.3). The secretary keeps the minutes book and, for five years, the convocations, communications and proxies of every meeting (article 19.4); the administrator keeps the community's documentation at the owners' disposal (article 20.e). Ask for the accounts, the contracts and the insurance policy in writing; a refusal is itself a ground of complaint to the meeting, which hears claims against the office-holders (article 14.a).

One thing the Act does not give you is a translation. The convocation, the minutes and the accounts are in Spanish, and no provision obliges the community to provide them in English or German; a professional administrator in a resort will often summarise in English as a courtesy, not as a duty. For an owner who does not read Spanish, the reliable answers are a proxy who does, a standing instruction to the administrator, or a lawyer's office as the address for notices — which turns every deadline in this article, the thirty days of article 17.8 and the three months of article 18.3 above all, into deadlines someone is watching.

Where we come in

For the foreign owners we advise, community matters arrive in three shapes: a resolution to challenge, a debt to defend or negotiate, and a building to buy or sell with its community papers in order. Our property lawyers in Corralejo and Costa Adeje read the deed and the statutes before a purchase, act as your address for notices and your proxy at the meeting when you want a lawyer in the room, and bring or defend the claims the Act allows within their short deadlines; the day-to-day of your community — fees, minutes, contractors, the change of a failing administrator — is the work of a community administrator, and the community administrators at Fuerteventura Properties explain how to change one. Contact us with the convocation or the minutes in hand: the clock in article 18 starts on the day you receive them.

Common questions

Can I attend the owners' meeting online or vote by e-mail from abroad?

Not under the law as it stands: article 16 of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal provides for a physical meeting and has not been amended since 1999, and a bill on video meetings and e-mail notices was still being amended in Parliament when this article was written. You may be represented by anyone you choose with a writing signed by you, and that proxy may carry your voting instructions.

Can the community stop me letting my flat to tourists?

Since 3 April 2025 the meeting may approve, limit, condition or prohibit holiday lets by three fifths of the owners holding three fifths of the quotas, and may charge the flats that let up to 20 % more in fees, never retroactively; an owner who wants to start must first obtain the community's express approval. Where the statutes already ban the activity and are registered at the Land Registry, they bind every owner.

Do I have to pay a derrama that was voted while I was absent?

Yes. Resolutions validly adopted bind every owner, and an absent owner who was duly notified counts as a vote in favour unless he notifies his dissent within thirty calendar days of receiving the minutes. For improvements the building does not need, an owner who voted against is not bound when his share exceeds three months of ordinary fees; and a derrama for improvements is owed by whoever owns the flat when the instalments fall due.

How long can the community claim unpaid fees from me?

Five years for each instalment, counted from its due date, as the Supreme Court confirmed on 26 November 2025 — a formal demand interrupts the period, and you must plead it. Until then the community may use the monitorio procedure, with its costs and lawyer's fees on you, and if you sell, the buyer's flat answers for the fees of the year of the sale and the three years before it.

This article is general information about Spanish horizontal-property law as it stood on the date of publication, verified against the consolidated text of Ley 49/1960 including the amendment of March 2026, the Civil Code, Organic Law 1/2025 and Supreme Court judgment 1726/2025. It is not advice on your specific situation: your community's constitutive deed and statutes add rules of their own, and the bill on remote meetings will change article 16 only when it is published in the Official State Gazette.