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 meeting itself
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.
Where the community is legally entitled to write to you
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.
Sending someone in your place
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:
- Choose the right person. Your proxy can be another owner, the president, a neighbour, or a professional. What matters is that they will be there and will read the agenda.
- Decide whether to instruct them. A blank proxy hands over your judgement; an instructed one ("vote in favour of items 1–4, against item 5, and abstain on anything not on the agenda") keeps it. For a meeting with a derrama on the agenda, instruct.
- Get it there in time. The proxy must exist before the meeting starts, not be reconstructed afterwards.
- Make sure your fees are paid. A proxy for an owner in arrears carries a voice and no vote.
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.
Majorities: not everything needs the same vote
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.
- Unanimity — for agreements that modify the constitutive title or the statutes and are not covered by a special rule (art. 17.6). The highest bar, and the reason some things never change.
- Three-fifths of owners and quotas — including, since 2025, the express agreement approving, limiting, conditioning or prohibiting tourist letting in the building (art. 17.12), and several classes of new or removed common services.
- One third of owners and quotas — the deliberately low bar for telecommunications infrastructure and for installing renewable-energy systems, which since the March 2026 amendment expressly includes aerothermal and geothermal systems (art. 17.1).
- Simple majority — everything else, including appointing and removing the administrator.
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.
The 30-day rule: how silence becomes a yes
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.
The minutes, and the window to challenge
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.
A short checklist for owners who live abroad
- Give the administrator a current Spanish notification address, and an email address in parallel.
- Pay the fee. Arrears cost you your vote and your right to challenge.
- When the convocation arrives, read the agenda, not just the date.
- If you cannot attend, send an instructed proxy — in writing, signed, on time.
- Read the minutes and note the thirty-day window.
- Keep your own copies. Your community's documents are yours.
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.
