They Took Over Our Apartment in Spain. Can We Get It Back?

Imagine you buy an apartment. You pay for it, furnish it and rent it out to holidaymakers. Everything seems to be working. Then one day you turn up to prepare it for the next guests and find that someone has changed the locks, moved in and has no intention of leaving.

Sounds absurd? It happened to us in Spain. This isn’t a story I heard from a friend or a sensational headline about okupas. It’s the story of our apartment in a coastal Spanish city.

The situation had already dragged on for 16 months. There had been two court hearings, we’d spent money and we still didn’t have our apartment back. Then something important happened: a Spanish court issued a judgment. It was much more favourable than we had feared a few months earlier. Did that mean we’d get the apartment back? We didn’t know yet.

I’d written about okupas before. I never thought I’d face this myself.

In 2020 I wrote about investing in Spanish property, including the story of a man who couldn’t get his house back for years after people moved in without permission. It sounded so unbelievable that I wondered whether the problem might be exaggerated. Spain has millions of homes; reported illegal occupations are a small part of the market. On paper, the risk didn’t look huge.

Statistics are less comforting when the apartment is yours. Today, I see that old post differently.

16 June 2025: the day we lost access to our apartment

We used our apartment for short-term lets. It was advertised on booking platforms, and every now and then we stayed there ourselves. On 16 June 2025, the person getting the apartment ready for the next guests found they couldn’t get in. Someone had changed the locks.

A woman was inside, apparently with a child. We had never met her and had no rental agreement with her. We called the police.

A rental agreement we had never signed

The woman showed the police a document that was meant to be a rental agreement. We had never entered into such an agreement. The police found that the person named as the landlord had no rights to the apartment. The details didn’t match, and the phone number on the document wasn’t real.

She said she had acted in good faith. It’s possible to imagine how someone could be tricked into paying a person who falsely claims to own a property. But the court did not accept that account in our case.

In its reasoning, the court pointed to possible deliberate involvement in preparing a false rental agreement to make the occupation look lawful. That is what the judgment said. It does not mean there was a separate criminal conviction for forging documents, and I don’t know whether there will be a separate case about that.

“I’ll move out in a few days.”

According to the court’s findings, when the police explained that the document didn’t give her the right to stay, the woman said she would leave within a few days. We checked again on 24 June. She was still in the apartment. This time, she said she wouldn’t leave until she found somewhere else.

And she kept her word: she didn’t move out. Weeks turned into months. We couldn’t take new bookings. With help from the booking platform, we were able to cancel existing reservations after it confirmed through its own channels that the apartment was unlawfully occupied. Apparently, the platform also contacted her.

We still didn’t know what condition the apartment was in. We had renovated it thoroughly, but couldn’t check it. And the costs of owning a property don’t stop just because you can’t use it.

Two hearings and months of waiting

The case went to court in Spain. I won’t try to explain the whole procedure here, but as an investor, I can say this: when you can’t use your property, every month of waiting has a real cost.

It’s not only the money. There’s the uncertainty, the calls with your lawyer, gathering paperwork and wondering when the whole thing will end.

At the hearing, the prosecutor sought a finding that the woman was guilty of illegally occupying the property. Our lawyer also asked for her removal from the apartment and compensation for damage and lost rental income. The defence asked for an acquittal. The court heard from the police officers who had attended on 16 June 2025, and their testimony mattered.

Then, in late September 2026, the court issued its judgment.

The court ruled the occupation unlawful and ordered her to leave

The judgment went in our favour. The Spanish court found the woman guilty of unlawful occupation of a property under Article 245(2) of the Spanish Criminal Code. Here’s what the judgment said, as I understood it when writing the original post.

First: the apartment must be vacated. The court ordered her to leave and return possession to the owner. The property is to be handed back without anyone occupying it. For us, that was the most important part.

Second: a fine. The judgment imposed a six-month fine, at €10 per day. At 180 daily rates, that comes to €1,800. The judgment said that if the fine isn’t paid, a substitute prison sentence may apply: one day for every two unpaid daily rates. If none of the 180 rates were paid, that would mean 90 days. I guessed she’d probably make sure this fine was paid on time.

Third: compensation. The court ordered compensation for damage to the apartment and lost rental income. The amount had not yet been set; it was to be determined during enforcement. So, at the time of writing, we did not have a specific compensation amount. The judgment gave us a basis to pursue it. The court also ordered the convicted party to pay the costs of the proceedings.

What did the court say about the fake agreement and good faith?

The supposed rental agreement was one of the most striking parts of the case. The court noted that the woman hadn’t shown evidence of paying rent or utility bills, or of trying to put water or electricity in her name. It also found no evidence that she had genuinely tried to find somewhere else to live.

The court also referred to the possibility that she knowingly took part in preparing a false agreement. Thinking it through, if someone really had rented a flat from a scammer and then learned from the police that the agreement was invalid, you might expect them to try to explain what happened and find a lawful way forward. In our case, she stayed for months after the police had told her the owner objected. The court found that she had acted knowingly, as the judgment put it.

We have a judgment. Do we have our apartment back?

Does winning in court mean you can open the door the next day and start renting the apartment again? Unfortunately, no.

The judgment is a major step, but it doesn’t mean we physically have the property back. The woman had the option to appeal. The notice in the judgment gave her five days from service to do so. We didn’t yet know whether she had appealed. If the judgment became final, it would still need to be enforced, including getting the apartment vacated. I didn’t want to guess how long that would take.

After all this, would I still invest in Spain?

I expect people will ask. A few years ago, I was asking myself whether the risk around okupas was really as big as the media made it sound. Now I have a very different kind of experience.

Does that mean I’d tell everyone not to buy property in Spain? No. But I take the risk of an unauthorised occupation much more seriously, especially when the owner lives in another country. When we think about a rental property, we usually analyse the purchase price, taxes, running costs, possible rent and returns. We may spend less time asking what happens if someone moves in and refuses to leave.

This won’t happen to every investor. I think it’s still worth understanding that the risk exists. We know that from experience.

Will this story have a happy ending?

I hope so. After 16 months, we had a judgment confirming that the apartment had been occupied unlawfully. The court ordered it to be vacated, imposed a fine and gave us the right to pursue compensation for our losses.

That’s a lot, but it isn’t the end of the story. Until we have our keys back and can go into our own apartment, we can’t call the case over.

There’s a certain irony in all this. I’ve spent more than twenty years in property development, buying, building and renting homes. I thought I’d seen most of the things that could go wrong for an investor. Spain still managed to surprise me.

You can own an apartment and have all the documents proving it’s yours, and still be unable to use it for months. That’s why I decided to write this story: not to scare anyone off. I like Spain, visit a few times a year and haven’t ruled out buying more property there.

I’ll write again when we know how the case ends. In the meantime, would you still consider buying a rental apartment in Spain, knowing something like this could happen? Or do you think cases like ours are rare enough that they shouldn’t affect the decision?