Spanish Shilling

Things to think about when buying a farm in Spain:

On any old farm the property was measured in ‘fanegas’ – a sort of rule-of-thumb measurement - and every village had a different size ‘fanega’ so the size of one ‘fanega’ here was, likely as not, different from that there. Now things are measured in hectares or square meters so it is standardized but the old properties aren’t. This makes it complicated when trying to read an old property deed.

Another thing is your boundary. Years ago a farmer might have traded a donkey for an olive tree on their land, the donkey will have long passed on but the olive tree now – at least in theory - belongs to someone else. It depends, of course, on whether somebody wrote it down. We ourselves, for example, have a reasonably clear and evident spread of land, plus, according to an old neighbour, an extra five or ten square metres, not existing on any document, about half a kilometer away.

One’s land usually stops at the top of a ‘barranco’, a level of once-arable land supported usually by stones (the dictionary isn’t very helpful), and not at the bottom. If you are lucky enough to have an ‘era’, that is, a round threshing place, you should find out if it is yours or for communal use. Or better still, see if anyone thereabouts still owns a donkey.

Rights of way and animal paths are another problem. For example, there's a piece of land behind ours that gives the owners the right to pass over our land to get to theirs so we cannot fence it off. It is just for the land-owners in this case and not the public but it is evidently something of a nuisance. The water or electric company also may have a special right of way so if you fence the land you must put in a gate wide enough for a vehicle and give them a key. An animal path, called a ‘vía pecuaria’ (or, in Andalucía, ‘una vereda de carne’), is for public use and may go right through the middle of your garden. They may not be used much any more but you may not fence or build or barricade it in any way. No, not even the mayor can. It is not just open to shepherds or farmers with land on the other side but it is in fact a public footpath.

Get your property surveyed because the piece you were shown might not actually be the piece you are buying, you might be buying the side of a cliff.

Many years ago, A trick sometimes played on one foreigner by another was to get a ‘papel del Estado’ – a fancy-looking watermarked paper dripping with seals and everything on it from the ‘estanco’ – the government paper, stamp, seal and cigarette shop - for twenty-five pesetas and merrily write your contract on that. If you didn’t know any better it looks pretty damn official. With more awareness, and a nodding understanding of the function of a notary and a lawyer, that has pretty much gone out of fashion but at one time, people ended up paying a lot of money for a paper they could have gotten at the ‘estanco’ and then finding out they didn’t own a house.

Check who has been paying the taxes for the last ten or so years because they might own the land now. Most old farm-houses or ‘cortijos’ have been inherited by a number of family relatives sometime along the way, so you need written consent from ALL members of the family in order to buy. Lot of times, there’s someone in Argentina, another in Barcelona, another dead (with six still-unlocated children) or in prison and there is often one ‘clever’ family member that holds out and winds up still owning a room in the house. It may not seem like a problem if it is an old ruin but once you have remodeled and are living in your new mansion they can put pigs in their room or try and sell it to you for a vast amount of money now that the property is worth something.

Does your farm come with ‘tandas’ or hours of irrigation water - from springs or the town fountain? If it does you need to know how many hours and what days your land has (it’s usually out of a cycle of ten days), then you go to the spring and change the water-ways to go to your farm and irrigate or fill a ‘deposito’ for later use. This can mean a very early start, depending on the timetable. Many farms have three or more springs that they are entitled to but it is a lot of work to walk down the water channels and move the gates so that the water reaches you.

Another thing to find out is if your land is protected archeologically, meaning you can’t under normal circumstances build at all. Indeed, we now have student archeologists, with the proud support of our town hall, merrily digging up a mountain just behind our house where there could conceivably be Moorish, or Roman, or Phoenician or even Martian ruins. It's all very exciting.

The land is registered with the ‘registro’ and also with the ‘catastro’. These two offices are mutually exclusive. The first is the Property Registry - think old bits of curling parchment and lilac ink – and the second is the Tax Register. Often, the property is different in one from the other: the vital one – often as we have seen rather lost in the old pine-tree and the large rock which boundaries with Paco el Loco’s land – is the true record of ownership. An ‘escritura’ or the rather shorter ‘nota simple’ are the receipts of the ownership: copying the salient points from the Register.