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Until recently, evicting squatters (known as okupas in Spanish) was a notoriously slow process bogged down by bureaucratic procedure. In some cases it could take months or even years for homeowners to recover their property.
However, with the approval of a draft law on Judicial Efficiency just before Christmas, it is hoped that things are finally going to change and the legal system will shift into gear.
READ ALSO: Okupas – What’s the law on squatting in Spain?
The new regulations, which Spanish media expects to be in place in the first months of 2025, allow for the crimes of breaking and entering and home invasion to be processed under fast-track trial procedures, meaning that they can be summoned and held in an estimated 15 days.
This essentially means that, from now on, squatting cases will be considered full criminal offences. It will be considered breaking and entering when the property is inhabited, while it will be home invasion or ‘usurpation’ when it is not.
“Lawyers have always been clear that squatting is a criminal offence, as it involves violence by force,” Arantxa Goenaga, partner at AF Legis and expert in property law, told Spanish online outlet 20 Minutos.
However for homeowners struggling with squatters, the most important change will be the fast track evictions. Until now, the fact that cases were taken through civil proceedings slowed down the process, according to Goenaga, who considers it “an injustice” that homeowners had to wait many months or even years to recover their homes.
La Razón estimates that 80 percent of eviction proceedings take between 4 and 9 months, but in many cases it can take 2 or 3 years in some parts of the country.
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With the change, squatting can now be tried through an abbreviated legal procedure, “a legal form that shortens timeframes and with which squatters will be tried in a maximum period of fifteen days from the time they are brought before the courts.”
The draft text will now be sent to the Senate, where the centre-right Partido Popular has an absolute majority, so it is expected to pass and then become enforceable law sometime in the first few months of 2025.
Squatting has become a divisive issue in Spanish society in recent years. At the end of 2023, figures from the Interior Ministry estimated that there were over 15,000 illegally occupied properties in Spain.