Front-Line Property in Spain: What the Coastal Law Actually Means

There are two stories about front-line property in Spain, and they contradict each other. The first one lives on expat forums. Buy on the beach, it says, and you do not really own anything. It belongs to the State, you are holding a concession, and one day somebody in Madrid takes it back. The second one is the one you hear across the table from the seller. It is a normal house, everybody here has one, do not worry.

My name is Daniel Bertomeu. The coastal law conclusions below are my father Juan Bertomeu's, ICALI 4643, practising on this coast from the offices in Moraira and Dénia since 1991; I write them up. We are independent lawyers and tax advisors, which means we act for the buyer. Not for the agent, not for the seller, and not for whoever wrote the brochure.

Both of those stories can be wrong about the same street. What decides which one applies to your house is not how many metres it sits from the water. It is a line the State drew on a map, called the deslinde, and in our experience almost nobody asks to see it before they pay a deposit.

So, is front-line property in Spain a concession?

Usually no. Most front-line homes on this coast are full private property, owned outright and registered in the owner's name, and the fact that the sea is fifty metres away does not change that.

Here is the distinction the market keeps collapsing into one word. A property can sit inside a coastal easement, a servidumbre, and that limits what you may do with it. It does not touch who owns it. You are the owner, you appear in the Land Registry, you sell it like any other house. The restriction lands on use, not on title.

A concession is a different animal. That happens when the land itself is inside the maritime public domain, the dominio público marítimo terrestre. Then you are not buying land at all. You are buying a right to occupy public land for a period of time, under conditions.

That situation exists, and it is real, but it is the exception and it comes from specific routes. The transitional rules of the 1988 Coastal Act cover a short, closed list of cases, such as land confirmed by a final court judgment before the law, or a registered owner protected by the Land Registry who had not been affected by an earlier demarcation. And then there is the obvious one: land that a demarcation brings into the public domain.

Passport makes no difference here, by the way. There is no separate coastal regime for foreign buyers.

What the deslinde is, and why it is the only line that matters

The deslinde is the State's official demarcation of where the maritime public domain ends and private land begins, and it is what decides your case. Not the distance to the beach. The row your street is in does not decide it either, and neither does what the neighbour says about his own house.

Two houses on the same terrace can land on opposite sides of it. One is private property inside a protection strip. The other is inside the public domain and held under concession. From the street they look the same.

So the check is not clever, it is just a check somebody has to actually do. You ask for the demarcation affecting that plot in writing, and you read it against a current nota simple from the Land Registry. Both, together. One without the other tells you half the story.

And read the whole nota simple, not just the charges box, because old easements often hide in the descriptive text of the plot. That is the same discipline as checking a property for debts and charges before you buy.

The 100 metre protection strip, and the 20 metre exception everybody mis-states

The general rule is 100 metres. The protection easement runs over a strip of 100 metres measured inland from the inner limit of the ribera del mar, the shoreline as the law defines it. That is not the same thing as the water's edge on the day you visited.

Now the part that gets repeated wrongly everywhere. You will read that the strip is only 20 metres in urban areas. That is not a general rule. The reduction to 20 metres applies in two specific situations, and both of them look backwards in time.

The first is land that was already classified as urban when the law came into force, on 29 July 1988. The second covers settlements consolidated in fact by then that obtained an extension of that treatment under the 2013 reform, through a window that has since closed.

So a modern urbanisation built in 1998 does not get the 20 metres just because it is urban today. The question is what that land was in 1988.

Inside the protection strip, new residential building is prohibited as a rule, with two express exceptions: land that was urban in 1988, under the transitional rules, and a case by case authorisation at Council of Ministers level. And a settlement that obtained the 2013 extension to the 20 metre treatment does not inherit that residential exception. It gets the narrower strip, not the permission to build. If your plan involves an extension, a new pool or a rebuild, that is not a detail to leave for later.

And the 6 metre transit strip is a separate thing

The transit easement is a different, narrower strip: 6 metres running along the inner edge of the shoreline, which has to stay permanently open for public passage. It is not the same as the 100 metres, and the two get mixed up constantly.

It can be widened, up to a maximum of 20 metres, but only where the passage is difficult or dangerous. That is the wording of the law and it is not a general power. If somebody tells you the transit strip is 20 metres as a matter of course, they are quoting the exception as if it were the rule.

What it means in practice is simple to state and unpleasant to discover late. That strip has to stay passable, so walls, gates and terraces that close it off are the sort of thing that turns up in a file years after the sale.

What changes if your house is inside the protection strip

Your ownership does not change. What changes is what you may do, and who has to say yes first. Works inside the protection easement need authorisation, and the authority is not the one you assume: in the Comunidad Valenciana the protection strip is the Generalitat's territory, while anything inside the public domain is the State's.

For older houses there is a further limit. Buildings already there when the 1988 law arrived are, broadly, allowed to be kept and maintained rather than transformed. So the villa with the wonderful sea view may be a villa you can keep beautifully and cannot reinvent.

If it really is a concession, the rules change completely

Then you are buying a right to occupy public land for a period, and there is one rule that decides whether the purchase works at all. A concession can be transferred, but a transfer between living persons is only valid if the Administration has recognised, beforehand, that the buyer meets the conditions. Beforehand. Not as a formality afterwards.

Terms are the second thing people get wrong. You will hear that coastal concessions were all extended to 75 years automatically. Not all of them, and not by the same route.

The 1988 transitional regime runs in blocks of thirty years. The 2013 reform created an extension that has to be applied for, with seventy five years as a ceiling rather than a promise, and a shorter term can be fixed. And there is a separate route in the Act itself under which a seventy five year term applies without a further application. Which of the three applies to a given concession is read off the resolution, not off a forum post.

And here is the one that quietly ruins families. On the death of the holder, the heirs have four years to tell the Administration about the death and that they intend to step into the concession. Miss that window and it is extinguished. Nobody sends a reminder, and it is exactly the sort of deadline that sits unnoticed in an estate handled from another country.

There is also a transitional rule worth knowing before you fall in love with a building. Where a pre-1988 construction sits on public domain land and falls within the transitional regime, the law contemplates its demolition when the concession ends rather than its survival. Whether a particular building falls inside that rule is read from its title and from the demarcation, not from its age.

Dénia, Jávea, Calpe, Moraira: this is exactly where it happens

These towns are where the question is live, because this is a coast of front-line apartments and villas built across four decades of very different rules. A flat in Dénia and a villa in Jávea can raise completely different versions of the same problem, and the same is true street by street in Calpe and Moraira.

There is one point worth making at coast level. The 2013 reform listed, by name, certain settlements excluded from the maritime public domain. None of the towns we work in, Dénia, Jávea, Calpe, Teulada-Moraira and Benissa, appears in that annex. So if somebody tells you a particular urbanisation was taken out of the public domain by that reform, ask which annex they are reading, and for a town we have not named that is a question for us to check rather than for you to assume.

If you are still choosing where to look, we built a short walk through of the towns between Oliva and Benidorm that you can run through in about five minutes, at where to buy on the Costa Blanca. It will not tell you whether one specific plot sits inside a demarcation, because only the demarcation for that plot can. It will tell you what each town is actually like before you spend a weekend driving.

The tax side, in two sentences

None of this changes your annual obligations as a non-resident owner. The filings are the same whether your house is on the front line or two streets back, and that side of things lives on our tax site at easy210spain.com. A concession does raise its own questions, and those we look at case by case rather than on a page.

What we ask for before a client signs on the front line

Whatever the property, these are the points we will not let somebody sign without. Not a long list, but each one has cost a buyer real money when it was skipped.

• The demarcation affecting that plot, in writing.
• A current nota simple, read from the first line to the last, not just the charges section.
• Confirmation of what is actually being sold: full ownership, or a concession.
• If it is a concession, the resolution itself, with its term, its conditions and its expiry date in front of us.
• If it is a concession, the prior recognition of the buyer dealt with before signing, not promised for later.
• If it came through an inheritance, whether the four year notification was made.
• If there are works planned, who authorises them and what they have said, answered before the deposit contract.

We do this for foreign buyers from the offices in Moraira and Dénia, in person or remotely with a power of attorney. Conveyancing starts at 1,600 euros plus VAT for properties up to 500,000 euros, with 0.2% on the amount above that, which is 200 euros per additional 100,000. If you want the wider picture of how a Spanish purchase works from start to finish, it is all set out in our guide to buying property in Spain as a non-resident.

Honestly, the most useful thing here is the smallest one. Ask for the deslinde. If the answer is a shrug, that is information too.

A quick legal note before you go

One last thing, and Juan makes me say it, because this is a law firm and a law firm has to say it. This article is general information, current as of July 2026. Coastal rules are one of the areas where the exact plot, the exact date and the exact demarcation change the answer completely, so nothing here is advice on your property, and reading it does not make you our client.

Before you sign anything or pay any deposit on a coastal property, get the demarcation checked for that specific plot. That is exactly what our conveyancing work for foreign buyers is for.