Convocation, proxies, majorities and the 30-day rule — how a Spanish junta de propietarios works, and why its decisions bind you whether you attended or not.
Every year, in a room in Corralejo or Costa Calma or Caleta de Fuste, somewhere between eight and forty people decide what your property will cost you and what will happen to your building. If you live in Manchester, Milan or Munich, there is a fair chance you will hear about it afterwards.
That is a solvable problem, but only if you understand two things: how the meeting is convened, and how it binds you when you are not there. The second one catches people out.
The junta de propietarios is the community's decision-making body. Article 16 of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal requires it to meet at least once a year to approve the accounts for the year that closed and the budget for the year ahead. Extraordinary meetings can be called at any time by the president, or when owners representing 25% of the quotas (or 25% of the owners) ask for one.
The convocation must state the agenda, the date, time and place, and both the first and second call. It must also include the list of owners not up to date with their payments — those owners may speak but cannot vote (art. 15.2). The minimum notice for the ordinary annual meeting is six days (art. 16.3).
Six days is the legal floor and, for a community with owners in five countries, an indefensible one. A serious administrator sends the convocation weeks out. Ours goes online the moment it is issued, in English, Spanish or German, with the proxy form attached and ready.
This is the article nobody reads and everybody should.
Article 9.1.h obliges every owner to notify the community's secretary of a domicile in Spain for all summonses and notifications. Note the wording: a domicile in Spain. Not your address in Britain, not your email — although many communities also send an email in parallel, and should.
If you have not supplied one, the law treats your unit in the community itself as your address for notification. And if delivery there is not possible, the convocation may be posted on the community noticeboard, where it produces full legal effect after three calendar days.
Read that again if you own a holiday apartment you visit twice a year. A notice taped to a board in a hallway you last walked through in October can be a valid convocation. Keeping your notification address current — and telling the administrator when it changes — is the cheapest protection you will ever buy.
You do not have to fly in. Article 15.1 allows attendance by legal or voluntary representation, and the formality is deliberately light: a written document signed by the owner is enough to prove the delegation. Where a unit is owned by more than one person, they must designate a single representative.
A few things worth getting right:
In our communities the proxy form sits in the portal beside the convocation, so it can be signed and returned the same evening the agenda arrives — no printing, no scanning at an airport, no post from Milan to Puerto del Rosario.
Owners often assume every decision needs everyone. It does not. The LPH sorts agreements into classes, and knowing which class an agenda item falls into tells you how much your absence costs.
And separately from all of this, article 10.1 lists works the community must carry out — conservation, safety, habitability, legally required accessibility — that require no prior agreement at all. Nobody votes on whether the building must be safe.
If you cannot tell which class an agenda item belongs to, ask before the meeting. It is a fair question and the answer changes how hard you should work to be represented.
Here is the provision that most surprises owners abroad. Article 17.8:
"Se computarán como votos favorables los de aquellos propietarios ausentes de la Junta [...] que no manifiesten su discrepancia [...] en el plazo de 30 días naturales."
Absent owners who have been duly notified of the agreement and who do not express their disagreement within thirty calendar days are counted as having voted in favour. The law attaches this mechanism to the agreement classes that need a qualified majority — the one-third and three-fifths votes above — which is exactly where it stings.
So absence is not neutrality. If you did not attend and you do not object in writing within thirty days of being notified of the resolution, you have — for the purposes of the count — agreed with it. Which makes one habit non-negotiable for any owner who lives abroad: read the minutes when they arrive, and diarise the thirty days.
Article 19 governs the acta: it must record the date and place, who attended and with what quotas, the agenda, and the agreements adopted with the vote counts. Once closed and signed by the president and secretary — within ten days of the meeting — the agreements are executive.
If you believe an agreement is unlawful, contrary to your statutes, or seriously prejudicial, article 18 gives you a route to challenge it in court. Two limits apply. The action lapses three months after the agreement is adopted, extended to one year where the agreement is contrary to law or to the statutes. And you must be up to date with your payments, or have judicially deposited what you owe, before you can bring it.
Three months goes quickly when the minutes take six weeks to arrive and then have to be translated. That is why we publish minutes as documents in the owner portal as soon as they are closed, rather than sending them out when the next mailing happens to go.
If your community's meetings are unreadable from a distance, that is not something you have to accept. It is the part of the job we think matters most — see what our community administration service covers, or tell us about your community.
