The renewal notice arrives in October, the premium is a line in the budget nobody questions, and the policy itself — forty pages of conditions in Spanish — sits in a drawer at the administrator's office. That is how most communities on Fuerteventura are insured: by inertia. It works until the day it does not: the storm that lifts the roof of a block in Costa Calma, the child hurt at the pool, the burst riser that floods three flats in Caleta de Fuste, and an insurer's expert who opens the policy and finds that the building was insured for half of what it costs to rebuild. Our leaks piece explained how a water claim is settled and the clocks the law sets for it. This one is about the policy itself: whether a community must have one, what a building policy covers and what it quietly leaves out, what the Consorcio adds behind it, and how to read the one number that decides whether a claim is paid in full.
Must a community insure the building?
Not by national law. The Horizontal Property Act imposes no duty to insure, and the Canary Islands add none — a point we made in our guide to the non-resident owner's obligations. The Act mentions insurance three times, and each mention is telling. The community's reserve fund, the 10 % of the annual budget every community must hold, «may be used to take out an insurance contract covering damage to the property» (Ley de Propiedad Horizontal, art. 9.1.f). The constitutive title may contain rules on «insurance, conservation and repairs» (art. 5). And a building destroyed beyond half its value ends the horizontal-property regime altogether «unless the excess cost is covered by an insurance policy» (art. 23). The law assumes a policy exists; it does not order one. Two regions have gone further on their own: in Madrid «every building must be insured against fire and damage to third parties» (Ley 2/1999 de la Comunidad de Madrid, art. 24), and in the Valencian Community the community of owners itself must insure the common elements against fire and third-party damage (Ley 8/2004 de la Generalitat Valenciana, art. 30). No Canarian law says the same.
The reason a community insures anyway is written in the Civil Code. «The owner of a building is liable for the damage resulting from the ruin of all or part of it, when it occurs for want of the necessary repairs» (Código Civil, art. 1907), and anyone who causes damage by fault or negligence must repair it (art. 1902). The community answers for its debts «with all the funds and credits in its favour», and once those are exhausted a creditor may pursue each owner for their share by quota (Ley de Propiedad Horizontal, art. 22.1). A cornice that falls on a parked car, a lift that traps someone, a pool without the right barrier: without a policy the bill is not the community's in any abstract sense — it is divided among the owners, including the one in Hamburg who has not seen the building in two years. That is what the premium buys.
What a building policy covers, and what it does not
The policies sold to communities in Spain share a structure, and it pays to know it before comparing quotes. The core is the continente — the building as a thing: structure, roofs, façades, stairwells, lifts, garages, the pool and its plant room, the common installations, and in most community policies also the fixed elements of the private units, the walls, floors and built-in installations of each flat, so that a flat's damage from a common cause is settled under one policy. What the community policy never covers is the contents of the flats — furniture, appliances, personal property — and the owner's own liability towards a neighbour: those belong to the owner's home policy, and an owner abroad should have one.
On that continente the usual guarantees are fire, explosion and lightning; damage by wind, rain, hail and snow above thresholds the policy fixes; water damage, including the search for and repair of the leak — the clause the leaks piece turns on; broken glass and sanitary ware; damage to electrical installations by surges; theft or vandalism of common elements; and the civil liability of the community as owner and keeper of the building, with legal defence and the handling of claims. Good policies add the liability of the president and board members for their acts in office, an extension our piece on the president describes, and an assistance service for emergencies.
What they exclude is as standard as what they cover, and it is where an island building meets its insurer. In the wording we read every year: wear and tear, corrosion and the mere passage of time — which on a coast with salt air and a sun that ages every membrane is a large category; lack of maintenance and defects the community knew about; gradual damp as opposed to a sudden escape of water; the burst pipe itself, as distinct from the damage it causes; damage during works the insurer was not told about; aesthetic damage — the tiles that no longer match — beyond a sub-limit; and, in the owners' home policies rather than the community's, the clauses that reduce or suspend cover when a flat has been unoccupied for longer than the policy allows, commonly a month or two. Every exclusion that limits the insured's rights must be highlighted in the policy and specifically accepted in writing (Ley de Contrato de Seguro, art. 3); a limitation buried in small print and never signed is not opposable to the community.
The sum insured: rebuild cost, not market value
The one number that decides a claim is the sum insured on the continente, and communities get it wrong in one direction: too low. The sum insured is «the maximum limit of the indemnity payable by the insurer for each loss» (Ley de Contrato de Seguro, art. 27), and if at the time of the loss it is «lower than the value of the interest, the insurer will indemnify the damage in the same proportion in which the sum covers the insured interest» (art. 30). This is the proportional rule, the regla proporcional, and it applies to every claim, not only to a total loss.
A worked example. A block of thirty-six flats in Corralejo would cost €6,000,000 to rebuild today. Its policy, renewed by inertia since 2015, insures the continente for €4,000,000. A storm strips part of the roof and floods the top floor: damage €30,000. The insurer pays two thirds — €20,000 — and the community levies a derrama for the rest. The premium saved over the years by the low sum is a fraction of that gap, and the gap grows with every claim.
The value that matters is the cost of rebuilding the building today — materials, labour, professional fees and demolition — not what the flats would sell for, and not the price the owners paid. The land is not insured, because a fire does not destroy it; a market value that includes it inflates the sum, while a sum copied from a policy written years ago underestimates it, and construction costs on the island have risen sharply in this decade. The policy's own tools deal with both errors: the same article lets the parties exclude the proportional rule by agreement (art. 30, second paragraph), which good community policies do under a «first-loss» or «waiver» clause; a policy may carry an index clause that updates the sum automatically, in which case it must state how (art. 29); and where the sum «notably exceeds» the value, either party may demand that sum and premium be reduced (art. 31). What the community needs every few years is a rebuild valuation by a technician or the insurer's own surveyor — built square metres times a current cost per square metre, corrected for the building's type — and a written instruction to the broker to insure that figure with the proportional rule waived.
The Consorcio: the part of the premium you never see
Every property policy in Spain carries a compulsory surcharge for the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros, the public insurer of last resort for extraordinary events, and the surcharge buys a cover the ordinary policy does not give. The Consorcio pays, on the same property and up to the same sums as the ordinary policy, for damage caused by «earthquakes and tsunamis, extraordinary floods, volcanic eruptions, atypical cyclonic storm and falls of meteorites», by terrorism, rebellion, sedition, riot and civil commotion, and by acts of the armed forces in peacetime (Reglamento del seguro de riesgos extraordinarios, RD 300/2004, art. 1). For a community on Fuerteventura three definitions matter.
- Extraordinary flood is the flooding of land by rain, by rivers or watercourses overflowing, or by «the surges of the sea on the coasts». It is expressly not «rain falling directly on the insured property, or collected by its roof or terrace, its drainage network or its patios» (art. 2.1.c): a roof that lets the rain in is the ordinary policy's business — or the community's, if the membrane simply died, as our roof piece explains. A sea surge into a ground-floor garage at the seafront is the Consorcio's.
- Atypical cyclonic storm includes «extraordinary winds, defined as those with gusts exceeding 120 kilometres per hour», a gust being the highest wind speed sustained over three seconds (art. 2.1.e.4º). The trade wind that rattles the island most afternoons is far below it; the storm that reaches it is the Consorcio's, and the ordinary policy's wind cover, with its own lower threshold, handles everything in between.
- Volcanic eruption is on the list — a cover the rest of Spain never thinks about and La Palma needed in 2021.
Three rules travel with the cover. The Consorcio does not pay for damage «due to a defect of the insured thing, or to its manifest lack of maintenance», nor for «the mere action of time» (art. 6.c and f) — a blocked drain full of calima dust is a maintenance question before it is a flood. The cover starts seven days after the policy is issued (art. 8), so a building insured the day before the storm is not covered by the Consorcio for it. And the proportional rule applies to the Consorcio exactly as to the insurer (art. 5.3), which is the second reason to get the sum right; the Consorcio values the damage itself, independently of the ordinary insurer (art. 10), and adds up to 4 % of the sum insured for mud removal, demolition and debris (art. 7).
The price is small. For dwellings and communities of owners of dwellings the surcharge is 0.07 per thousand of the sum insured a year, at the tariff in force since 1 January 2026 (Resolución de 28 de marzo de 2018 de la DGSFP, as amended by the Resolución de 30 de diciembre de 2025); on the €6,000,000 building of the example that is €420 a year. A community counts as «dwellings» for that rate when the policy covers the common zones and at least a quarter of the built surface is housing. Property damage to dwellings and to communities of owners carries no deductible from the Consorcio, unlike commercial risks, which bear 7 %.
Liability: the cover that protects every owner's pocket
A building policy's liability section is the one that stands between an accident and the owners' quotas. Under a liability policy the insurer covers «the risk of the insured becoming obliged to indemnify a third party for the damage caused by an event provided for in the contract» (Ley de Contrato de Seguro, art. 73); the injured person may claim directly against the insurer (art. 76); and unless agreed otherwise the insurer takes over the legal defence and pays for it (art. 74). For a community that means the pool, the lift, the garage door, the loose railing, the tile that falls from the façade onto the pavement and the slip on the wet stairwell are handled and paid by the insurer, lawyers included, up to the limit in the policy.
The limit is the line to read. A liability sum sized for a small block without facilities is not sized for a resort community with two pools, a gym and a hundred units; the policies we compare for the communities we administer are read for the overall limit, the per-victim sub-limit and the specific covers — the pool, works in progress, staff, the board — because a limit that is exhausted leaves the community, and then the owners, paying the difference under article 22 of the Act.
The clocks: claims, renewals and the duty to tell
A loss must be notified within seven days of learning of it, the insurer must pay at least the undisputed minimum within forty days and owes interest after three months, and a dispute over the amount goes to one expert per side and a third if they disagree — the sequence the leaks piece walks through (Ley de Contrato de Seguro, arts. 16, 18, 20 and 38).
Renewal has its own calendar, and it is why insurance sits on our autumn checklist. A policy renews year by year unless one party opposes it in writing: one month before the anniversary if it is the community that wants out, two months if it is the insurer, and the insurer must announce any change to the contract two months ahead (art. 22). A community that decides in November to change insurer for a January renewal is too late; one that compares quotes in September is in time.
Finally, the duty to tell. Before the contract the community answers the insurer's questionnaire about the risk (art. 10); during it, the community must communicate «as soon as possible» any change that aggravates the risk in a way the insurer would have priced differently (art. 11). Roof works with scaffolding, a new pool, a lift installed where there was none, a building opened to holiday lets: the insurer may propose new terms within two months and the community has fifteen days to accept them (art. 12). An aggravation never declared reduces the claim in proportion to the premium that should have been paid, and cancels it altogether if there was bad faith (art. 12). The administrator who reports the works to the insurer before the first scaffold goes up is not being fussy; the clause is in the Act.
Reading a quote: the eight lines
When three quotes are on the table for the meeting, these are the lines that decide, in the order we read them:
- The continente sum and its basis — a current rebuild value, stated as such, not last year's figure plus inflation.
- The private units — whether the fixed elements of each flat are inside the sum, and at what value per unit.
- The proportional-rule waiver — present, or absent.
- The liability limit — overall, per victim, and the sub-limits for the pool, works and the board.
- Water damage — search and repair included, gradual damp in or out, the per-claim limit.
- The weather thresholds — the wind speed and rainfall from which the ordinary cover responds, below the Consorcio's 120 km/h.
- The excesses — the franquicia per claim, which turns a cheap premium into an expensive year.
- The Consorcio surcharge and the intermediary — the surcharge is the same in every quote; the intermediary's remuneration is inside the premium, and the meeting is entitled to ask who is paid by whom.
Where we come in
Our administrators in Fuerteventura read the policy before it renews, commission the rebuild valuation the sum insured should rest on, put three comparable quotes to the meeting with the eight lines side by side, report works and changes to the insurer in time, and handle claims from the first photograph to the expert's report — with the owner abroad copied at every step. See our community insurance service, or ask for a quote.
Common questions
Is community insurance compulsory in the Canary Islands?
No. Neither the Horizontal Property Act nor any Canarian law obliges a community to insure the building; only Madrid and the Valencian Community impose fire and third-party cover by regional law. Communities insure because the Civil Code makes the owner of a building liable for damage from its ruin, and because the community's debts fall on the owners by quota once its funds are spent.
What happens if the building is under-insured?
Every claim is reduced in the same proportion. A building worth €6,000,000 to rebuild and insured for €4,000,000 receives two thirds of any loss — €20,000 of a €30,000 storm claim — and the owners pay the rest by derrama. The rule can be excluded by agreement in the policy, and the sum should be a current rebuild cost, not a market value.
Does the Consorcio cover storms and calima?
It covers extraordinary events: floods from rain or sea surges, winds with gusts above 120 km/h, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and terrorism, on the same sums as the ordinary policy, with no deductible for dwellings and communities. It does not cover rain that enters through the roof or blocked drains, nor damage due to lack of maintenance; those belong to the ordinary policy or to the community.
Does the community policy cover the inside of my flat?
Usually the fixed elements — walls, floors, built-in installations — when the damage comes from an insured cause, but never your contents or your own liability towards a neighbour. An owner abroad needs a home policy with water damage and third-party liability, and should check its clause on flats left unoccupied.
